[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  Ellie watched her go, then began folding the dishrag she was holding into small squares.

  “And your Ansel?”

  “He’s in Kansas, Papi,” she said, the old term of endearment out of her mouth before she could remember she was forty-one.

  “Kansas?” he said, the coldness coming into his voice, but the back door opened, and there stood Neva, staring at them both, wearing those grating clacking bracelets of Aldine’s. Ellie could tell her father wasn’t sure who Neva was; he had probably not seen a photograph since Neva was a baby.

  “That’s my youngest, Geneva Louise. Neva, this is your Opa Hoffman.”

  Neva stared but didn’t move.

  “How old are you, meine Liebste?” her father asked, his voice a little too loud for the endearment to ring true.

  Neva said she was eight. For once, Ellie didn’t remind her to smile and to look adults in the face when she answered them.

  “Do you want some coffee?” Ellie asked her father. “Then we have to get these pies into Hurd’s car and over to the Practice House.”

  “The practice house?” her father said. “And what is this practice house?”

  Ellie tried to explain, but the more she heard of her description, the less she liked it.

  “So,” her father said, “this is where good girls learn to become good wives?”

  Ellie couldn’t bring herself to say yes. “Something like that,” she said.

  Her father was nodding. “It is a good idea,” he said. “We should have these practice houses all over the country.”

  “What can I do?” Neva asked. She came over and wrapped her arms around Ellie’s legs. “I don’t have anything to do.”

  “Go play Fat and Lean with Clare,” she said. “And when Ida gets back, she’ll help you try on your dress. I’ll be upstairs soon.”

  Hurd had appeared, and he and Opa were soon discussing real estate over pie and coffee (More dishes to clean, Ellie thought). Her father asked one question after another about crop yield, abundance of water, cost per acre, hourly wages. She wondered if he even remembered that Clare was hurt. She’d written him about the accident but hadn’t mentioned that Ansel wasn’t here to help.

  She began settling pies into cloth-lined baskets so they could be carried to the car and Hurd, seeing this, rose to help. He brought the car around to the back door and they took out all the pies except for the chocolate creams that were still cooling under wax paper.

  “I’ll bring those later,” she said. She’d expected her father to ride to the Practice House with Hurd, but he didn’t. He returned to the café and sat on a counter stool watching Ellie as she collected the cups and saucers he and Hurd had just dirtied.

  “And why is your Ansel back in Kansas?”

  She looked at him, then looked away. She wished Nevie hadn’t gone upstairs. If she were still here, he wouldn’t have dared to ask. Ellie scoured the dishes and silverware, rinsed them, dried them. Only then did her father say, “Eleanor?”

  She hung the last cup from its cupboard hook, and turned around.

  “He has TB,” she said. She was surprised by the tremor in her voice. “He went there to keep it from us.” She didn’t like giving Ansel a noble reason for leaving her, but she preferred it to her own humiliation.

  “And you know this without a question?”

  She nodded. Dr. Quigley had told her. He had waited for a private moment. It wasn’t just that his words were solicitous; it was his eyes, too, and his gaze seemed to slip in and slide through her body, a strange feeling to have while learning your husband is mortally sick.

  “I think he went there to protect us,” she said.

  “And you and the children, none of you have it?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Good,” her father said, nodding slightly. “That’s good.” It was a kind of declamation. The look on his face was the one she’d observed as a girl when he’d closed a ledger book containing satisfactory results and rose from his desk and said, There.

  Footsteps on the stairs, then Neva pushed open the door and said, “Clare won’t play Fat and Lean. He doesn’t feel good.”

  Her father turned on the counter stool and faced Neva. “Your Opa needs a boutonniere,” he told her. “Want to help him buy one?”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Neva said.

  “It’s a flower. For proud Großvaters to wear.”

  “I’m going to be the flower girl,” Neva said. “But I don’t want to be.”

  “The flower girl will know what color I should buy,” he said, “and where the flower shop is.”

  Neva shook her head. “There isn’t a flower shop.”

  Her father made a low humming sound. It seemed almost as if the fact that the town had no flower shop was being added to his real estate computations.

  “Ida’s bringing roses from her garden,” Ellie said. “We have flowers year-round here.”

  Her father seemed not to be looking at her but through her. Then he turned abruptly to Nevie. “And perhaps you could teach your Opa the Fat and Clean,” he said.

  99

  The next morning, Dr. Stober posted a note on his office door saying that the office was closed for the day because of family business. He’d thought of writing In order to reclaim stolen car but decided against it; a shrewd investigator kept his intentions to himself. He walked to the shop of the man who formerly changed the oil in his car and said that the 1932 Nash Phaeton with carpeted floors that he had bought for his wife, Lucy, just before she died had been stolen, and that he now knew the name of the man who had stolen it.

  “That’s a nice car to have stole from you,” the man said, sleepy eyed and sluggish. His name was Carlisle and he seemed too potbellied to slide himself under cars all day. There were no cars, at present, in the shop, and Carlisle had been warming himself beside a red-mouthed heater, laying out cards for solitaire. The air smelled of grease and cigarettes.

  “I need you to drive me out where he lives. The man who took it.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Dr. Stober told Carlisle what Sonia Odekirk had told him the night before: “In Loam County, about seven miles due east of Dorland.” The old woman had let things go downhill in her housekeeping—that was the first thing he’d noticed—and it had cost her what little respect he’d still had for her, but she was at least willing to confirm that she’d known someone named Ansel Price and that Aldine had lived with his family while she taught school.

  “Loam County?” Carlisle asked and when Stober nodded, Carlisle said, “That’s quite a drive.” He placed the two of spades on an ace.

  “I am aware,” Stober said.

  Carlisle flipped three more cards to a king he couldn’t play, then whistled a single descending note to emphasize his displeasure with either the game or the plan. Dr. Stober wondered how frequently, if ever, Carlisle put a washcloth to his face.

  “Five hours to get there,” Carlisle said, flipping another set of three cards. “Five hours back. Minimum.”

  “Which makes it fortunate that I came at a slow time,” Dr. Stober said.

  “Might get a customer, though,” Carlisle said. “Been known to happen.”

  “I’ll pay for the gas, and I’ll pay you by the hour,” Dr. Stober said.

  “Whether the car’s there or not,” Carlisle said, not as a question but as a contractual clarification.

  “That’s correct,” Stober said. He wanted to say that he knew the car would be there, but it had occurred to him that if the Scottish girl and the runaway husband could steal a car, they could sell it, too. Or just keep driving it to destinations unknown.

  “Alrighty then,” Carlisle said, standing and leaving the cards where they lay.

  100

  Ansel held tight to the post in the center of the barn for the strength to keep upright. To cough as he coughed was like being made to turn himself inside out, lung by lung, and the liquid that was rising was not bile or water but blo
od, and more of it than he would have thought possible. But in time the bleeding stopped, and he was grateful, as he lay down on a horse blanket, that the blood was not bright red on the bedroom floor or on the sheets, like childbirth blood, because that would terrify Aldine. He would tell her what had happened later, after he had gathered strength to drive the tractor one more time to Sonia’s house, for more provisions. He would tell her what they needed to do to keep her and the baby safe: separate this, separate that, he remembered. Separate forks, separate plates, separate beds.

  101

  Will Cooper stepped off the Santa Fe–Topeka in Emporia and wondered in which direction he should go to find his wife’s sister, the one he had not saved. A porter provided directions to the police department office, where a sturdy middle-aged woman in a blue dress asked if she could help him in any way.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ve come here to look for my sister-in-law,” and when he said her name was Aldine McKenna, he could tell that something serious was already known, that the name was familiar, the way her eyes flicked and she stood up and said, without smiling, “Just a minute, sir. Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll go have a word with the deputy.”

  102

  Carlisle had just driven over the Loam County line and Dr. Stober was sucking on a clove-flavored Necco Wafer to keep himself awake when he saw, in the distance, a yellowish bank of clouds. They were driving straight toward it, so he guessed they’d be getting wet. Or maybe snowed upon. He didn’t mind snow, especially if he was watching it from a warm quarter, could in fact be lulled by the hush of it falling. But he knew the dangers of a heavy snow, out driving in unfamiliar territory, down unmarked and unpaved roads. It was a curious color for a snow cloud, though, and the air didn’t feel wet when Dr. Stober rolled down the window and stuck out a tentative hand.

  “Jesus,” Carlisle said. “It’s one of them dust blizzards. Roll that window back up and hang on.”

  103

  Aldine didn’t see the growing bank of clouds because for once the baby had fallen asleep after nursing and she had fallen asleep, too, curled around her like the pod around a pea. She didn’t wake up until Ansel stood in the bedroom at an unusual distance from the bed, his face stricken and strange, his manner odd.

  “What is it?” she asked, talking low because Vivien was still asleep in her warm arms.

  “I’m going now,” he said.

  “To Sonia’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong? Don’t you feel well?”

  “A little fever’s all. I’ll rest when I get back.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go. We still have cornmeal and coffee and syrup. You can go tomorrow.”

  “I think I should go now. The weather looks like it could get bad.”

  “Then you shouldn’t go. Or you should take the car. You’d have no protection from the wind on the tractor.”

  “I can’t drive the car until I take it back to Emporia. We decided that.” His voice was strained and he sounded so tired.

  “Give me a kiss then.”

  He didn’t come any closer.

  “Not even on the cheek?”

  “I’d better not,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “I’ll kiss you when I’m better.”

  “All right,” she said. “When you’re better. But take the car, please?”

  He gave a little wave, then nodded and went down the stairs.

  When she woke up again, the house was completely dark and she thought she must have slept the whole day, but then she heard the hurled grit of the wind, and when she looked out the windows, she knew what she would see. She tried to nurse Vivien in the darkness but Vivien howled; Aldine rocked and rocked her and tried to remember how long ago Ansel had left for Sonia’s, and if that were long enough for him to be safe inside Sonia’s house, where the walls would form a shelter against the wind.

  104

  Carlisle speeded up as if to get someplace before it hit. The clouds got higher and darker, and the few grasses that survived on either side of the road seemed to be trying to bury themselves. A bird swooped in front of their windshield so suddenly that Carlisle touched the brakes, and then they felt the thump of a rabbit under the wheels. Dr. Stober placed a smooth gray Necco Wafer on his tongue and checked the window again. It was tight. “Hang on,” Carlisle said, and he pulled off the road and into a parking lot, where he snugged up close to the sheltered side of an abandoned building.

  Like a living mountain the dust traveled toward them, and Dr. Stober was startled by the changing colors of the light within the car: pale yellow, then smoky gray, then no color at all: darkness in midafternoon, like an eclipse. The smell of the dust was overpowering and he coughed through the fingers he had instinctively used to cover his mouth and nose. It tasted like the dirt he’d eaten once when he was too small to know better, the same moldy, rusty taste and bony grit. He kept on breathing and swallowing. He took out the last handkerchief Lucy had ironed and wiped his tongue on it, and then touched its other side to his tearing eyes. He wondered calmly if he could suffocate in the car. He coughed, he cleaned his tongue, and he thought of Lucy.

  It seemed longer, but by his pocket watch, it didn’t last more than fifteen minutes. The blackness grayed, then browned, then turned a kind of brown-orange until the world was merely dingy. It was like opening your eyes in dirty water. He sat still in the car and waited to see what would happen. The dust remained in the air, but it was no longer buffeting the car. The wind had either died or moved on.

  “You owe me extra for that,” Carlisle said, pulling the car back onto the road.

  Dr. Stober didn’t answer, just touched his tongue to his sandpaper teeth, then wiped them with the handkerchief he found balled within his fist. This was the world we have made, he thought. Everything hammered and mortared and roofed and fenced had become as insubstantial as sand castles on dunes. When they reached Dorland a little while later, the light was still mauve. The queerest thing about the storm’s aftermath was the absence of shadows; not even the buildings on the town’s small Main Street could cast one.

  105

  The old leather belt was there, the one Ansel had used to keep himself attached to the tractor on long night rides, and Ansel considered tying himself on, but he wasn’t sleepy. He could see Sonia’s house in the distance: the frowsy brush of cottonwood trees, the bluish roof of the two-story house, the line of ash on the eastern side.

  The house was still two hundred yards away when the storm began to take into itself the dirt through which he rode on the vibrating seat of the tractor. He had not hitched up the trailer this time, but still he could go no faster than seven, maybe eight, miles per hour. He pulled the handkerchief up over his mouth and nose, as he had always done, pushed his hat down farther on his head, and increased his speed slightly. The chugging became a whine, and he licked his lips under the handkerchief.

  The wind, when it shoved him, was so fierce and skin piercing that he bent over to protect himself the way he had once protected Aldine, his arms and legs retracting into his rib cage as if remembering some primitive incarnation, when the body was part shell. He tried to take in breath, but dirt flew into his throat, and in his first coughing fit, he tipped backward and fell, striking the field with his shoulder and tumbling over. He had thought, when he climbed onto the tractor, that he would ask the doctor, when he saw him, if there was a treatment he could try. He would figure out a way to pay the man, over time, for the use of the car, and he would get through this bad time as he had gotten through others.

  The tractor moved dumbly on, sightless, until it reached the road, on the other side of which was a fence erected by Horace Tanner. The nose of the tractor struck a well-buried post and chugged weakly for a while, then gave out when the front wheels of the tractor were buried several inches deep in powdery dirt.

  106

  It was four o’clock and the air was still orange-pink when Dr. Stober stepped out to urinate beside a tractor that
had been parked haphazardly by the road. Empty houses, rusted cars, mailboxes with the doors hanging down like the tongues of dogs—he’d been seeing all these things since stepping inside the post office in Dorland and receiving directions to the Price farm. A roofless house, a pack of dogs, a wandering pig, he’d seen it all—but to just park a tractor midway into the road and leave it?

  It was only when he put out his hand to steady himself and felt the warmth of the tractor’s engine that it occurred to him to look in the direction from which the tractor had come. He saw a blue heap that was almost certainly human, small in the midst of the scudded soil and motionless, arm askew. He looked over at Carlisle in the driver’s seat of the car, hunched over and fumbling with something, a cigarette, most likely.

  Dr. Stober turned back toward the form. “Hello there!” he shouted. “Are you all right?”

  The heap didn’t stir.

  “Hello?” he shouted again. Behind him, he heard Carlisle open the car door.

  The doctor began by trotting, but the closer he came to the blue clothes and the stillness, the slower his pace. He walked the last few steps in dust that puffed up into his cuffs and shoes, and when he stood over the dead man’s body he didn’t know which bothered him more: that the ear canal was entirely filled with dirt, like a child’s bucket, or that the soil by the man’s mouth was as dark with blood as the bed in which Lucy died.

  Carlisle drew up behind him, and stared down at the body. They both stood staring for a few moments. Carlisle stubbed out his cigarette and put it into his shirt pocket and said, “He’s dead, in’t he?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Stober said. “He’s very dead.”

  107

  It wasn’t a long storm, not like the other one. Aldine stood up when the darkness browned bit by bit and she stood at the window with screaming Vivien, whose tiny nostrils were red from her anxious daubing. When she wiped her own nose, she expected the cloth to come away brown, but it didn’t. Her nose was not dirty, and Vivien’s nose was not black inside.