[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  “What about these?”

  “Wrap them and stack them. We can only take so much.”

  He was rigging up the trailer behind the car when Aldine came walking up the drive, bundled head to toe, like something in a beautiful, wintry old-world painting. She smiled at the sight of him and it came upon him in a rush, the feel of her against him in the truck, the way all the tension and fear had drained out of her and how he had just held her and closed his eyes and felt all his own troubling worries slip away, too.

  “Sonia might’ve brought you up to the house,” he said.

  “She wanted to. But I wanted to walk the last little bit.” She regarded the trailer. “You’ll be packing up then?”

  “Mmm. Just what we need for a while out there. We’ll come back. We’re not leaving for good.”

  She looked at him and said nothing but there was kindness in her eyes, and concern, and—this was the hard part—he didn’t know what else.

  “Cold,” he said, just for something to say.

  “But peaceful,” she said, letting her eyes rest on him a moment more before gazing back down the lane she’d just walked. “You can almost feel its peacefulness when the wind isna’ blowing everything away.”

  And then her keen eyes were on him again. “You know, way inside you, down in the bones.”

  He did know—he felt exactly so himself even if he couldn’t have found such a pretty way to put it. He said only, “You enjoyed yourself? In Newton?”

  “Oh, yes, very much. We had the grandest time in Woolworth’s. I especially liked the area with a funny name, where they have buttons and stays and such.”

  “Notions.”

  “Yes! Notions.” She released a small musical laugh. “And then we sat at the counter for chocolate malteds and cheese sandwiches that were ever so—” She must have realized what she was saying, for she checked herself and seemed now, by expression, to be begging forgiveness.

  “They make a good malted there,” he said. He knew Ellie was probably watching from the kitchen window, and maybe Lottie, too, but he couldn’t help himself. He let his eyes settle fully on hers. “It would have been a shame if you’d left Kansas without tasting . . .” A malted from Woolworth’s was what he’d thought to say, but instead he said, “something indulgent like that.”

  “Mmm,” she said, looking at him, and just that—her gaze and her low murmuring—sent blood stirring through him wildly.

  “A letter came for you,” he said, forcing gruffness into his tone. “Ellie put it inside.”

  “Well then,” she said, searching his eyes for a moment and then dropping her gaze, and without another word she went inside.

  An hour or so later, when they all sat down to supper, Aldine was not among them. Ellie said the blessing, and began to pass a plate of biscuits and a bowl of syrupy apricots, which was all there was, but the room was thick with the girl’s absence.

  “Where is she?” Neva said. Her small voice had been coarsened by coughing.

  “I’ll go and see,” Ellie said, before anyone else could.

  After she’d left, Clare said, “Do you think she’s all right?”

  Ansel picked a biscuit from the plate and was surprised by his hand. It was trembling like one of a man sick or aged. Everywhere it was nicked from working in tight spaces with tools, and under the black hair, red scabs and pink scars showed, and there it was, his solid hand, trembling.

  “Dad?”

  “What?” he said, more sharply than he intended. He set down the biscuit and rested his flattened hand on the table.

  “Miss McKenna,” Clare said. “Do you think she’s all right?”

  “I think so. She received a letter today from her sister, which might mean good news.”

  “But the postmark was from Salt Lake City,” Charlotte said. “I thought her sister lived in New York.”

  Neva clacked the Bakelite bangles on her wrist—Aldine must have finally just given them to her—and said, “I don’t want to go to California.”

  “I do,” Charlotte said, her blue eyes bright. She made an impish smile. “It’ll be looove-ly.”

  To his own surprise, Ansel’s hand rose and slapped down hard on the table so that the plates and silverware jumped and clattered. A heavy silence followed until Ansel at last mumbled an apology. He looked up from his plate and scanned the rooms. “It’s just that . . . it’s no one’s fault—except my own and Mother Nature’s—but I never thought we’d be leaving the place.”

  It fell quiet again until they heard footsteps on the stairs, a stern series of clicks on the planks. It was Ellie, and only Ellie.

  “There’s no money from her sister,” she reported. “It’s worse than that even. Her sister wasn’t writing in response to Aldine’s letter. She hadn’t even received the letter.” Ellie cut through an apricot, then stilled her knife. “If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny,” she said. “The sister was writing on her own, in hopes of borrowing money from Miss McKenna.”

  “From Miss McKenna?” Ansel couldn’t keep from saying.

  Ellie nodded. Aldine’s sister and brother-in-law had been called to Salt Lake, she said, and they’d spent all their money on the baby and travel and hoped that Aldine might help them through. Ellie shook her head. “In the letters she wrote them, she never mentioned she wasn’t being paid.”

  There was silence until Clare said, “She should just come with us to California.”

  Ansel took a bite of biscuit, but it seemed to lie hard in his mouth. He took a bite of apricot to help it down. He tried to sound hesitant when he said, “I suppose we could do that.”

  “Goodie!” Neva said, but no one responded, and she said it again, louder.

  “Where would she sit in the car?” Charlotte asked. She looked actually alarmed. “Where would she live when we get there?”

  “If there’s work for us,” Clare said, “maybe there’d be work for her. They have schools, don’t they?”

  Neva said, “She can have my place in the car. I could sit on her lap.”

  Ansel picked a final crumb off his plate. He could almost hear the terrible wrenching of his family as it pulled in opposite ways, he and Clare and Neva on one side, Ellie and Lottie on the other, and the girl in the middle. But they had an obligation, didn’t they? They had brought her out here, and now her problems were theirs, too. So why not bring Aldine along? he thought, and then, to his surprise, he heard himself say it: “Why not bring the girl along?”

  When Ellie stared at him with reproachful eyes, he stared right back. He wanted to be near the girl. That was all, nothing more. Was that wrong? And being near was all that he wanted. To be near was enough.

  “I’m sure Miss McKenna would prefer to go back home,” Ellie said in a quiet, controlled voice. “The school board is just going to have to meet its obligation here so she can go back to her own family.” She paused. “In the meantime, though, she could work in Emporia at the Harvey House.”

  Ansel was incredulous. “The Harvey House?”

  She nodded.

  “They couldn’t be hiring, not now, with—”

  But she cut him off. “They aren’t hiring. But they will hire her.”

  Her father. Her father had arranged something.

  “But a waitress,” he said. “She came here to teach school, not wait on tables.”

  “You married a waitress, Ansel,” Ellie said. “It was good enough for me and it was good enough for you.” She set her face. “It’s a paying job when paying jobs are hard to come by.”

  “And your father had nothing to do with this?”

  Ellie looked away and told Neva to eat her biscuit.

  “But will she be okay,” Clare said, “being all alone like that?”

  “Gil’s still there,” Ellie said, “and two girls are getting married. It’s a good place to work. She’ll have girls to talk to”—she paused—“and I’m sure Gil will look after her.”

  Neva pushed her food around on her plate and said,
“Can you get me a job there, too?”

  Ansel was seeing Ellie in a way he had never seen before, and this new incarnation cost her sympathy. He said, “It isn’t Mother you need to ask, Neva. You’ll need to take your case to Opa. He solves all our family’s problems.”

  He waited for Ellie to say something, or even to meet his eyes, but she did neither. So it was true.

  Ansel went out to finish packing the trailer after supper, but he was so reluctant to complete the task that his progress was slow. At last, when everything was set and roped, the house was dark and black clouds had cut off the moon. He backed the trailer into the barn, which felt like some kind of sad joke. Putting the trailer inside to protect it from rain. The wind had begun to blow. He closed his eyes and stood smelling the barn and listening to the creaking boards and an owl’s low chortle and whoo. He’d used up all the firewood. He found the sledgehammer and knocked some planks from a stall and cracked them into shorter lengths. He got a fire going in the stove and stared into it, moving only as needed to feed in more wood. He did this for a long, long while.

  When finally he walked back to the house, it was very late. Neva and Ellie lay on the bed arranged for Neva near the cookstove in the kitchen. He stood in the door frame wondering if they were asleep.

  “Trailer safe?” she asked through the darkness.

  “Mmm. Unless the barn blows away.” She didn’t reply, so he said, “Are you staying down here again?”

  Neva shifted in the bed, and Ellie waited for her to grow quiet again. “It’s better if I can be here to put more water in the kettle,” she said. “Keep the air moist for her.”

  “Sure,” he said. “That makes sense,” and he turned to go upstairs alone.

  He lay fully dressed on their bed. Last night, he’d heard creaking on the stairs and then low voices overhead. Clare’s voice, he was sure, and the girl’s. Clare hadn’t stayed long—Ansel thought he heard the girl sending him away. Still, Ansel had left his bedroom door ajar. To hear Clare, if he should pass again, that was what he told himself. But on this night, no matter how still he lay, or for how long, his body would not give itself up to sleep. The windows shivered under the wind. He got up and looked in on Clare—the boy didn’t stir—then he went downstairs and found Neva and Ellie both snoring gently. He stood watching them for a while, and wondered what had gone through old Tanner’s mind at dinner the day he shot his mules.

  When Ansel climbed the stairs, he supposed it was to return to his bed, but he did not return to his room. He moved past it, and eased up one step after another, toward the attic.

  Aldine’s door was closed fast. His turn of the knob produced a click and a squeak, and by the time he’d pushed the door open, Aldine was sitting bolt upright in bed, the covers pulled tight to her neck.

  “Oh, it’s you then,” she whispered, relaxing her hand on the covers. “I was afraid it was Clare.”

  “I need to talk to you,” he said in a stiff whisper.

  She swung her legs about so there was room for him to sit on the bed.

  He raised his hands and held on to the doorjamb as if holding against something pushing from behind. “No,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “Not here.” The wind shivered the window glass, slid through the wall cracks. His skin felt different. It seemed as if some crusty everyday part of him suddenly dissolved, or was suddenly shed, and what was left was a new skin meant not to repel but receive. He closed and opened his eyes in a slow blink. “Put on your coat,” he whispered, and hearing how gruff it sounded, he tried again. “Please put on your coat and come with me.”

  45

  Clare didn’t know what awakened him. The wind, he supposed. The moon had risen outside his window, and he could see the long horizontal crack in the plaster of his wall and the nail that had once held his photo of Tom Mix and his horse Tony Jr. Clare removed his hand from the warmth of the blanket to look at his Tom Mix Straight Shooter signature ring. He’d had a wooden Tom Mix gun, too, with a revolving cartridge, but he’d traded it for Neva’s goldfish, gone now to Opal. The ring had looked like copper and silver in the ads, but it was just painted tin. He’d found the ring and the diagram of Tom Mix’s injuries among some clothes while packing and slipped the ring on his pinkie, unwilling to throw it away. He remembered how similar his hand was to Aldine’s in size if not smoothness and a sudden impulse came to him and took hold: he would give the ring to Aldine as a pledge that he would send for her once he had enough money. She should have someone to count on, and why shouldn’t he be that someone? Clare pulled his pants over his long underwear and crept up the stairs.

  The door to Aldine’s room was not quite closed, and when he pushed it open, he saw the flat mattress and blanket. Aldine was gone.

  He hurried down the one flight of stairs to his parents’ room. He would tell his father that she had run away. They would go after her, bring her back, make her safe. “Dad,” he whispered, and whispered again, louder, but he was looking at an empty bed.

  He nearly yelled. He felt like yelling. Where was everyone? He had the sudden fleeting fearful sensation he remembered from fairy tales when parents sent their children off, or abandoned them in the woods somewhere. He listened to the house and heard nothing but wind. He eased down the stairs slowly and still listening.

  From the doorway of the kitchen, he could see his mother and Neva curled up together on the narrow bed. He didn’t speak or move. He held his breath. But his mother shifted in the bed and looked up, as if she had felt someone in the room.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Can’t you sleep?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I have to go out and relieve myself.” That was the way she had taught him to speak of bodily functions, the only phrase they could use.

  “All right,” she said, and returned her head to the pillow.

  He was quiet when he left the house and quiet as he approached the lit barn. He knew a place where he could look into the barn without opening the door, a wide enough crack between planks. Why he went to that crack instead of opening the door was a question he would ask himself later. He wondered whether the car was there, and this was the quickest way to find out. If it was gone, it was simple. His father had taken Aldine to the station already and he would not get to say good-bye to her.

  When he brought his eye to the space between two boards, he saw at once that the car was there. Then he saw Aldine’s back. She was wearing her gray wool coat, and her hair was pressed down under her beret. She sat on a bale of straw. His father had lit a lantern and was talking quietly to her, partly obscured by more bales. He heard him tell Aldine, “You’ll like working there. Lots of people your age.”

  He could hear Aldine crying, but she didn’t answer.

  “Here,” her father said, extending his hand, “this will get you started.” And when she wouldn’t take it, he said, “It’s okay. I got more than I hoped for the cows.”

  She didn’t touch the money his father set on her knee.

  “Take it please,” his father said, but she didn’t.

  “I should never, ever have come here,” she said in a small, bitter voice.

  “Oh, don’t say that.”

  “But what I don’t understand is why. Why did you do it then?” Aldine asked.

  Clare watched and waited. He would forgive Aldine anything, but it wasn’t fair of her to blame his father. His father hadn’t been the one to fire her. His father hadn’t been the one to withhold her pay.

  Aldine brought her hands up to her face, then leaned forward at the waist. Clare couldn’t see her head when she did that, and his father had drawn back out of sight.

  “Writing me that note. Why did you do that?”

  There was a scraping sound, like a boot on the floor. “I just thought we could do better with an outsider,” his father said. “Someone who knew poems and played music. And my pal Terence Tidball told me I could run a classified ad for free so . . .”

  She raised her head and looked up at him. �
��No! I didn’t mean that. I meant, Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses,” she said, enunciating each word. “And being set I’ll smother thee with kisses.”

  Clare recognized the lines, and the poem they came from.

  “What?” his father asked.

  Aldine didn’t answer. She was sitting up straight again. She was no longer crying. “Someone in the house gave me a note with those lines on it. I saw that you had the Shakespeare book out here that day when you fixed my boot, and I thought—”

  Aldine stopped talking for a few seconds.

  “I thought you meant . . . ,” she said, her voice almost strangled.

  “Oh, Aldine,” Clare heard his father say softly, “I couldn’t write a note like that.”

  Aldine was staring at his father. She stared and stared. Finally she said, “I guess it was only Clare then.”

  She fell silent and Clare felt the cold in his nostrils and fingertips, in the knuckles he held against the rough wood of the barn.

  “Aldine,” his father said again.

  “I know. I should’ve known you’d ne’er think of me that way.”

  “But that isn’t true,” his father said, and Aldine kept her face down and Clare watched his father reach for her hand.

  It was a clumsy gesture—even Clare knew that much—but like something released from gravity she rose up into his arms, and he began to kiss Aldine in a way that Clare had never imagined one person might kiss another. It was shocking and alarming and dreadful. They looked ravenous for one another, and Clare stepped back, weakened in the legs, his body beginning to shiver violently.

  Clare turned and walked toward the house. His legs felt heavy, like he was wearing boots of ice. Somehow he opened the yard gate, then the door to the mud porch, then the front door. He made no attempt at quietness.

  “Clare?” his mother said in a calling whisper. “Clare?”

  Clare said nothing and took himself upstairs.