by Laura McNeal
Ansel’s knees didn’t bend that easily and they were starting to ache. He sat down on the floor so that he could lean against the wall, but he laced his hands together so that he wouldn’t reach out to take her hand. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin peered from their frames with placid eyes.
Aldine took her hand back as if embarrassed. She said, “When Leenie and I were growing up, we had an aunt who wasn’t married. The story our da told us was she’d been in love with a Japanese man who didn’t come to fetch her until it was too late.”
“What do you mean too late?”
“I don’t even know! We always thought it was because she was too old. When you’re a child, people can seem old. We saw the man once, when he came to ask her. And then he went away again, and she went on living alone. Leenie and I, we were always planning to meet our Japanese man at the right time, and go off with him, and not be alone for years and years, wearing fascinators and trying to get other people’s children to like us.”
Ansel wasn’t sure what a fascinator was. “You’re still young,” he said. “You’ll be happy.”
“Like you and Ellie?” she asked.
He thought about that. Did he and Ellie seem happy? By some measures they were. As happy as anyone was at that stage of things. And now here he was beside Aldine, and she was curled up inside the old curtains and he felt an overpowering urge to caress her.
Ansel tried to look only at his hands or at the walls. The wind shook the building, seeping through the cracks.
“I’m so cold,” Aldine said, and he looked unwillingly at her eyes and mouth. Her smooth hair fell forward around her face and because she was still lying down, it was like seeing her when she first woke up in the morning, as if they were in bed together. Ansel stood up. He intended to do it quickly but found himself stiff and old feeling, as he often did lately. He said he would put more coal in the stove, but the bin was empty when he looked.
“I used what was inside already,” she said flatly. “I was going to tell you when I got home that we needed to fill up.”
With his wife, his daughters, or even Clare, he would have had the warmth of his body to offer. Even to imagine this with Aldine was to go dry-mouthed with desire, so he waited a moment before he said, “Another reason to leave now. Before it gets colder and darker.”
Aldine simply curled herself smaller inside the pile she’d made. She tried to remember the Venus poem. Something about kissing where there was no hiss of death. The wind was nothing if not a hiss of death, and if Ansel had copied down those words for her, if he had felt what she thought he felt that day in the barn, would he act on it now? From a distance adultery seemed so obviously wrong and resistible, and yet what she craved now was the man before her, with his large hard workman’s hands, his sturdy limbs, his quiet way of being. She loved him. If he were not married, he would be her Japanese man—that was the truth of it. And then she had a terrible thought: What if Aunt Sedgewick’s Japanese man had been married? When she met him the first time, or even perhaps later on? She had always assumed that poor Aunt Sedge made the wrong decision, that she was just too timid to seize her own chance at happiness.
“We have to get back,” Ansel said. “They’ll be worried.” He remained standing, and she remained on the floor. “Miss McKenna,” he said, and he reached his hand out to help her rise, willing himself to make this ordinary gesture, telling himself it would make their relations courtly and chaste. She put out her hand and the touch of it was something he tried not to let his blood race toward. As long as he said nothing, did nothing, the feeling would go away. Her hand was cold and small, and she tightened her grip on his hand without making an effort to stand.
“I’m afraid,” she said, the only words that expressed both how she felt and how she was allowed to feel. If he had moved his hand or his body closer, she would have met him eagerly, but he was just looking at her and his face was so grave, so sorrowful, that she only held on to his hand and waited.
He pulled her up, and she thought he would pull her into his arms. George Washington and the flag. The flag and Ben Franklin. Aldine’s own script on the chalkboard, the white words she had copied out, oil broil hoist coil.
“Pull that blanket you were using up around your head,” he said hoarsely. “Shut out some of the wind while we run for it.” She reached down to pick up a blue curtain panel and draped it over her head.
“Take my hand,” he said, “so you don’t get lost. I’ll lead you.”
She took it, but he didn’t move. She stepped forward and pressed her body against his, laying her face against his chest, her arms clutching him. When his arms caught her to him, something like a sob shook her, and she couldn’t tell if it came from relief or fear. He held her very tightly until it passed, and she felt a dark measureless want.
38
Charlotte told Emmeline, and Emmeline told her father, who must have told the inspector, that Ansel Price nearly died driving to the school to fetch a teacher who was using school-owned coal to heat herself on a Saturday afternoon. “She was smoking, too,” Charlotte had added. The novel that Emmeline and her father found on the school floor early Monday morning was The Harvester, just as Charlotte said, and inside the front cover of the novel was Charlotte’s handwritten name.
Charlotte knew that her father would not have said that he nearly died, but that was how it had seemed to her and her mother during the five hours that they waited in the suffocating brown gloom of the house. They had peeled potatoes and cooked them in gritty water, and they had told Neva not to worry, but they had worried. Neva was too sick to stay alert during the strange dark afternoon, slipping into sleep until she coughed herself awake, then drifting off again.
Her father’s explanation, that he couldn’t get the truck to start, that they’d been sitting in the truck in the schoolyard most of the time, that darkness fell and then the wind stopped, at which time the engine turned over just fine, was logical enough, but Charlotte didn’t like the way Aldine slipped up the stairs wearing that old curtain over her head like the Virgin Mary or something, her face pale, her eyes red, not even bothering to say, “Sorry,” or to ask, “How are you?”
39
While waiting for the inspector to arrive on Friday afternoon of the following week, Aldine went about the empty schoolhouse wiping dust off the bookshelves with a damp white cloth and a pail of water. It was good to work. It kept her warm. They had brought coal for the stove, but just the littlest bit, not enough for even a week. She had to stop and refill the pail with clean water every five minutes or she streaked the varnished shelves with mud instead of cleaning them. The shelves would be gritty again by Monday, but it gave her something to do.
As she worked she was aware, as she had been aware since the day of the storm, of a difference in her skin. All over her skin was the desire for Ansel, which was like the electricity that clung invisibly to her cracked fingers, which pulled her skirt against her legs and stuck her hair together and sparked on metal. In Ansel’s truck she hadn’t been able to stop shivering, had cried unintelligibly and tried to open the door again so she could go back inside the school, which at least didn’t rock back and forth in the wind, but he gathered her body against him and said, “Shh. Shh. Close your eyes, Aldine, and don’t look.”
He’d never before used her Christian name, and it made his voice sound different—closer, more intimate. “I can still hear it!” she cried. “I can still hear the hissing sound!”
“Sing then,” he said, but she cried harder and dug her hand into his shirt.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”
“Shh,” he murmured, just as if she were his daughter. “You’ll be all right. We’ll just wait it out, is all, just wait it out.” He had said that over and over until she stopped trying to open the door and held still. She was more or less in his lap by then, and although they were both gritty and there was on his neck the smell of dirt and the smell of sweat, she kept her face against his ski
n. It surprised her now that she hadn’t kissed him. She wanted to kiss him now, it was true and shameful, but in the truck, in his arms, there had been a nearly guiltless intimacy to his embrace that soothed her.
Outside, Aldine heard the motor of a car. Then a few seconds of quiet, followed by a car door slamming. Footsteps on the stairs, and then the inspector entered the schoolhouse without knock or greeting. His manner was brusque. He brought the winter in with him. He removed his hat and took up a stance ten paces from Aldine. He stared at her for a moment, and said, “There have been reports of impropriety.”
Aldine looked at her pail of dirty water, not at the man with the stiff face and brushy mustache and fancy hat. “Impropriety,” he said again.
“Meaning?” Aldine asked, looking up now. That she had worked for five months without pay was not mentioned. That was improper, if you asked her.
“The use of the school premises for non-school activities. The burning of coal for personal comfort.” The inspector might have added that Mr. Josephson had lowered his voice to mention a rumored impropriety of another sort, but that was always the problem with these unmarried schoolteachers, wasn’t it? It was the devilish bind the boards were in—they couldn’t hire a married teacher, had to fire one who got married, in fact, but unmarried women, especially those who were young and fetching, could get into trouble in a farm town just as quick as they could in the city. One more reason why, in his opinion, the country schools needed consolidation. Board them up, that was the thing now. Board them up and consolidate.
The girl had looked away from him in clear impudent disdain, and now squeezed her rag into the pail, leaning forward a bit, her thin dress pulling tight, her skin so milky and smooth it seemed nothing had ever touched it, not even the sun. There’s talk she’s set her eye on Mr. Price, Mr. Josephson had said in his murmuring voice.
“So,” he said, and when the girl turned her round, pretty face to him, he felt in a raw way the nature of her sin whether actual or contemplated, one only the necessary step to the other, and he wondered if this was the way it was in Ireland or wherever she came from—that you set your cap for a man, married or not.
“As of today,” he said, “the school is closed for the near term.” He was glad to see the hurt in her eyes, the way they lost their impudence. “You’ll need to complete your assessments of each pupil for the incoming teacher.”
Aldine suffered his words like a series of blows, and felt her skin flushing from both anger and humiliation. That this stout, stupid man with his stony face and his hairbrush mustache who knew not one blessed thing about her and her schoolteaching could make her feel like a chastened child made her livid. “I didn’t pockle the bloody cool,” she said. The muddy water had whitened the cracks in the hand that shook as she pointed at the stove. “I’ve no place of my own, have received no money at all, and have lived with a family that has not been paid to keep me. It’s the school board that has pockled my pay.”
“The board will consider your salary in the context of recent events,” the inspector said evenly. “There is the matter of deducting for the coal, of course, and also”—he seemed to be savoring his command over the situation—“other matters.”
“Other matters?” she said. “And what other matters would there be?”
The inspector set his hat on his head and turned the brim until it was just so.
“Deducting for the coal, you are saying to me?” She was yelling now. She couldn’t remember when in her life she last had. “You can’t take something from nothing!”
If her words or tone influenced the man, he didn’t show it. He kept walking. It was a large car he drove away in.
She finished the damp-ragging, she didn’t know why. Then she straightened the books and used the transom hooks to take down the planes and strings. She would save Neva’s for her, but she would burn the rest, with Emmeline’s going first. She was sorry the hideous girl had the goldfish. She who’d won it the only one in the class who hadn’t wanted it. She cleared her desk so that it was just as she had found it five months before; then she put a bit more of the coal in the stove and held her hands over it. If they gave her nothing, where would she go? How could she buy a ticket? How would she leave?
She pulled the red cloth Riverside Shakespeare from her satchel and laid it on the very pile of books where she’d found it that first day of school; then she seated herself at the desk and opened her grade book. She would do the assessments, carefully and completely. She would not give the school board one thing more to excuse their failure to pay her the wages she deserved.
40
While Ansel drove the straight oiled road toward Wichita, Ellie sat in the backseat with Neva’s head in her lap. She’d stroked the girl’s forehead until she’d finally fallen to sleep and now Ellie sat without moving in order to let her sleep on. From up front, Ansel didn’t speak; he had barely spoken since leaving the place. He hadn’t accompanied her a week ago Monday when she’d taken the girl to see Dr. Gilling in Dorland and he hadn’t believed the diagnosis when they returned. “Dust pneumonia,” Ellie had told him, and waited for the words to sink in, just as Dr. Gilling had with her. Dr. Gilling seemed to feel bad about the pronouncement, but Ellie, strangely, felt a kind of relief, first to have a name for the sickness that Neva could not shed and, second, to know that it was a sickness that came with a cure. It was only after these two reactions that the astonishing implication of it all had risen within her: Leaving Kansas was no longer just an option. It was a necessity. “Leave Kansas,” Dr. Gilling had said. “Kansas is going to kill her.” She’d recited those very words to Ansel, and didn’t know whether he hadn’t trusted the doctor’s judgment or simply did not want to believe it. He had insisted on seeing a specialist he’d heard about in Wichita and when Ellie, feeling defiance accruing within her, asked him how he thought they would pay for this specialist in Wichita, he had waited a long while before saying, “Maybe we can borrow it.” Which of course meant calling her father, and she had tightened her lips and said, “Okay then.” So she’d called him, and he’d listened in silence before finally saying, “So! Your daughter is sick and your husband will not get her to safety.”
“He will,” Ellie said. “He just wants to be sure the diagnosis is right.”
“And your husband has no money to pay your child’s doctor bills?”
Ellie didn’t answer. She could hear breathing on the line—Lu Walls and Jeannie Simpson, listening in—and then at last her father said he would send the money through Western Union. “And also, Eleanor, I am going to mail you a check for one hundred dollars. Do not cash it except for the expenses of leaving that place.”
She had begun a sentence that started with, “I don’t need—” but he cut her off by saying, “Good-bye, Eleanor.”
After he hung up, she heard the muted clicks of Lu Walls and Jeannie Simpson disconnecting. She went looking for Ansel in the barn; that was where she most often found him these days. He was bent over the tractor, tightening something with a box wrench, but she sensed he was aware of her approach, a sense confirmed when he stopped tightening and stood stock-still as her footsteps in the oily dirt drew closer. Why did she say nothing? Why did she wait for him to turn? To see the disappointment in his eyes that it was her? Because that was what she saw—fleetingly, faintly, but she saw it. He was let down to see her instead of someone else.
“That was funny,” he said. “I was just thinking of Charlotte and then your footsteps sounded like hers.”
He was lying—she was sure he was lying—and that only deepened her disappointment in him.
“My father’s sending the money,” she’d said in a neutral voice and Ansel had nodded and turned away and fitted the wrench to the head of another bolt. She’d said nothing about the one hundred dollar check and the conditions required for cashing it. He would find out soon enough. She should have mentioned it because Lu Walls and Jeannie Simpson would already be telling everyone who would listen, but she hadn�
�t told Ansel.
Now, this morning, in the backseat of the Ford, Neva coughed, opened her eyes to find Ellie’s face, and closed them again. Ellie snugged the blanket over the girl’s ears, then stared out at the passing landscape, the flat line of the horizon separating endless beige from endless gray. What if the specialist said she had something else? This was the fear she had been fighting since the appointment had been made. What if the specialist didn’t think that curing Neva would require them to leave Kansas and the Scottish girl and all of the rest of it behind? What would she have to do then?
41
That afternoon, the sky was as white as frost, and Clare was clenching and unclenching his toes on the front porch, wishing he had a hot sugared roll to eat, the kind his mother had once baked three times a week. He could taste the butter, the sugar, the cinnamon, the tang of yeast.
The door opened behind him and Charlotte walked out in her coat, singing her new favorite tune, which the radio seemed to play ten times a day. “Not much money, oh, but honey, ain’t we got fun?” She slapped him on the shoulder and announced, “We’re going to California!” She couldn’t keep from smiling and rising up on her toes a little.
“What?” Clare asked. He looked at the frozen wheat field, the brown rise of the hogback ridge against a pale blue sky, the empty pigsty, and the outhouse. At such moments, their smallness in the world seemed pitiful. Charlotte threw a handful of dried corn to the last three chickens.
“Mom’s inside writing to Aunt Ida,” Charlotte said. “If you ask me we should have gone years ago.”
Clare had always wanted to go to California, too, but that was before Aldine appeared.
