Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  At breakfast, Elise ate oatmeal until she was bloated. Even her father noticed.

  “Were you sent to bed without any supper last night, Elise?” he asked, and when he got up to get more coffee, Lorena whispered, “Had you been here, Harold, you would know that we dined on roast chicken, field peas, stewed tomatoes, and corn bread.”

  Elise nodded at the steaming pot of oatmeal on the stove.

  “What?” said Lorena.

  She nodded again, vigorously. They would need to eat enough to last until supper as whatever their mother packed for lunch would freeze before they reached Hobart. But Lorena shrugged as if she did not understand or as if she was watching her figure again and did not want to swell up of a morning with porridge.

  Much snow had fallen through the night. Her father’s pants were wet to the thigh from a trip to the woodpile. The coyote wind continued, the house creaking as if it were about to be dismantled board by nail. There was some talk between her parents about whether the girls should stay home, but the girls said they’d made it in far worse conditions, which was untrue, but her father seemed satisfied with the answer, or else he was struck suddenly with an idea.

  As soon as their mother pinned the blanket tight and slapped Sandy on the croup, Elise whispered to Lorena, “You did not eat enough and you are going to freeze.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “By the time we get halfway to Hobart, the soup Mother packed will be cold and there will be no stove to heat it up on. Your toes will be black if they are still attached to your feet.”

  “We are going to school as always.”

  “We are going to Hobart to conduct research for my work in progress,” said Elise.

  “That is not possible.”

  “Why is it not possible?”

  “Sandy doesn’t know the way and we could not get there and back by the time school is out, even if we were going to cut school.”

  “Sandy does know the way and we can get there and back in time.”

  “I suppose you asked Sandy?”

  “I don’t have to confer with Sandy on such matters. But I did ask Mother.”

  “You asked Mother?”

  “Yesterday when you fled to her room to be with your implements of beauty, I asked her if Sandy knew the way to Hobart and she said yes and I asked if we could make it there and back in one day and she said yes.”

  “And did you tell her you were not going to school as well?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter to me if you did as long as you did not say I was not going to school, because I am.”

  “You would leave me to the elements?” Elise was thinking of both the sky and of the unsavory element rumored to frequent saloons.

  “It was not my idea to go to Hobart on a foolish errand in the first place.”

  “But it was. You are the one who is confused as to which saloon L. C. Ivent is the proprietor of.”

  “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.”

  “No one has yet died from it.”

  “Of it. And no, perhaps not, but many lesser marriages have been made because of some women and most men badly ending their sentences.”

  “The man I marry will not care how I end my sentences,” said Elise.

  “That is a far more terrifying thing than this treacherous journey you have it in your mind to take.”

  “For us to take.”

  “Sandy is a horse, Elise.”

  “How old do you have to be to say such a thing?”

  “What I mean is, Sandy is only a horse. He cannot do the things you would have him do.”

  “Such as?”

  “For starters, he has never seen the sea.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We were present at his birth. Unfortunately,” she added. “There are details I wish I did not remember.”

  “He does not inform us of every trip he takes.”

  “Never mind. If you want to believe that Sandy visits the seashore, I cannot stop you. But he does not know the way to Hobart.”

  “Of course he does. Mother said so.”

  “Mother indulges you. It’s easier for everyone.”

  Possibly this was the meanest thing her sister had ever said to her. Was it true? Or was her sister just trying to get her to mind? It was not true. Her mother felt too deeply to indulge Elise, which would have been insincere. Her mother was many things, but insincerity called for an effort too concerted for her mind, which skittered about in the manner of a fly unsatisfied with any surface.

  Elise wanted suddenly out of the blanket, no matter the severity of the blizzard. But it was hard enough for Sandy to negotiate the snow, which would have come to Elise’s waist.

  “Elise,” said Lorena. But Elise did not answer her. She said nothing at all to her sister for the rest of the journey, nor when they arrived at school and were met by Mr. McQueen for the unpinning and Lorena waited for her to go inside, which she never did anymore. Lately, the moment Mr. McQueen helped her down off the horse, Lorena took off to stand over the potbelly stove in the center of the classroom and talk to Edith Gotswegon. But today she waited for her sister. Elise engaged Mr. McQueen in idle talk of horses, using terms like withers and gaskin and pastern, which impressed Mr. McQueen so much that he asked Elise if she wanted to become a veterinarian. Elise said she would probably become a concert pianist in Asia Minor, and when she grew weary of constant travel, she would start her own newspaper. Mr. McQueen, excited by both these notions, quizzed her on the particulars. Out of the corner of her eye, Elise saw her sister mummify herself with her scarf and disappear into the white wind.

  Twenty minutes into the school day, during spelling, which was her favorite subject, Elise raised her hand and asked to go to the outhouse. Mr. McQueen always seemed embarrassed when girls asked to go to the outhouse. Characteristically, he said yes without looking up. But Lorena said, “It’s brutal out there, I will go with her.”

  “Do you need to go?” said Elise.

  Lorena’s face scrunched up with embarrassment and rage. Mr. McQueen had looked up from the dictionary from which he had been selecting words for them to spell. He appeared flustered by whatever was going on between the Stewart sisters.

  He said to Elise, “Do you need your sister to accompany you?”

  “Of course not. It’s right outside.”

  “I do need to go,” said Lorena, rather desperately.

  But it was too late. Mr. McQueen said, “I think it best to take turns in these situations,” which made the boys laugh and made Lorena look like she might have suffered a stroke and gave Elise enough cover to slip into the coatroom and grab her lunch before she made her way to the stable, where Sandy looked up, as if to say, What took you so long?

  2

  GUS MCQUEEN

  Hibriten, North Carolina, 1910–16

  The road in winter was red with mud. On his way to school Gus tried to walk on the shoulder to protect his boots, but there were places where it dropped off to steep bank. Either muddy road or the risk of tumbling into briar patch or standing water: these were his choices.

  Sometimes he was made late cleaning his shoes by knocking them against the front steps of the schoolhouse.

  He was slight for his age, with a fair complexion that suffered under the sun. Because his younger brother, Leslie, had died of measles, his own freckles terrified him. His reddish-blond hair was the source of his nickname, Sandy, although his real name was Augustus McCallister McQueen. Big name for a slip of a boy, his aunt Mattie said. She called him Gussie, which of course he hated.

  He often felt he had such a slip of a life that he did not need a name. No one talked to him much, at least not in a way he found interesting. So go along and look beyond. He did not feel sorry for himself.

  His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was three, a year after Leslie was born. Five years later, when Leslie got sick, his father took him over the mountain to a place called
All Healing Springs. Leslie died two days later. What was the point, Gus wondered at the time, of a spring called All Healing when it did not heal all? Some Healing Springs, it should have been called, though in time Gus began to doubt that fresh water filling the bottom of a bathhouse was good medicine for anything but washing the mud off your feet.

  So it was Gus and his father alone in the house that his father had built for his young bride. At first his father farmed, but after two years of drought, his father took work in town. He built barrels by day and worked on the house nights and weekends. He added rooms. Built a new privy. It took Gus over a year to understand that the house, its various improvements (the pond his father dug down by the creek, the arched bridge he built to cross it, the bench he erected that only Gus, Latin homework in hand, ever graced) was a shrine to his mother. Only in the construction of something his father could see did his grief recede.

  Nights he watched his father work until, an hour’s light left in the sky, Gus crossed the cornfield to the river to mute the sound of his father’s industry. Yet it carried: saw teeth chewing a felled pine, the chunk of adze shaping log into floorboard, ceaseless hammering.

  Gus attempted nightly to cross the river. But something kept him stranded. Either the river was high and fast from snowmelt flowing down from the Blue Ridge or the boulders he could have rock-hopped across appeared striped with sunning serpents.

  His desire to cross over—to move beyond earshot of his father’s grief, to escape his own—was also what marooned him on the bank. It was the first he knew of the deliciousness of denial.

  In his twelfth summer, Gus got work in town at the millinery. The store closed at six in the evening. He stayed to mop, then walked the three miles home. One night in early October, the last light turned the sky pink above the trees. He was two miles from home when he smelled the smoke. He arrived to find cinders in the air, the roof giving way, then the walls, until only the grand chimney remained. He watched from the road, loud with the whinnying of horses pulling the water wagons and with dogs amok with excitement. He heard the sweet swish a fire makes and decided it was a secret whispered into his ear only: rivers never burn.

  They moved in with his father’s sister, Mattie, a widow who lived a half mile down Hudson Bend Road. Her land also bordered the river.

  One night in the spring, his father said, “There’s work down in Charlotte.” Gus watched his aunt’s back, broad and stooped, and knew from the way that she did not turn from the stove that she had been told already that Gus was now hers to raise.

  “When will you be back?” Gus knew the answer. He said it to spite.

  “Soon as they let me go long enough to make the visit worth the time it takes to make the trip.”

  It was more words than he’d heard his father utter since the fire.

  “And who is ‘they’?”

  “Whoever it is runs things.”

  “So you have a job already?”

  His father studied Gus. Those days he ate little and without pleasure. He looked at his son as if Gus too were a mealtime that needed to be gotten through.

  “There’s work down there,” he said.

  Aunt Mattie put plates in front of them. Gus’s father picked up his knife and sawed away at a slice of ham.

  “I’m old enough to work,” said Gus. “I got on at the millinery.”

  Gus stopped short of saying he could come along to Charlotte, that if there was work to be found, they—whoever they were—could hire him too.

  “You’re to stay here and finish your schooling,” said Aunt Mattie.

  His father nodded so slightly that Gus thought maybe he imagined it. He watched his father push his chair back and take his coffee on the back porch.

  The next morning Gus came down to breakfast an hour earlier than usual. At the sink he pumped water to wet a comb and dragged it through his hair.

  “Mind you don’t use too much,” said Aunt Mattie. She had just gotten the pump installed and was used to the precious water Gus hauled up the hill from the creek.

  They sat down to eat. He would not ask. He wouldn’t. Halfway through his bowl of oatmeal, the only meal he would get until dinnertime because his aunt either did not know or chose to ignore the fact that she was to provide him with lunch for school, she answered his question anyway.

  “It’s a day’s ride down to Charlotte. He said to tell you he did not want to wake you.”

  Gus spooned oatmeal into his mouth. He was no longer thinking of his father or making sure, as he usually did at breakfast, that he ate enough to patch him through to dinner. He was thinking, as he often did, of the river. The dark woods beyond it. There weren’t really serpents sunning on the rocks. Only sticks washed down from upriver. Things the river swept away from shore. Once he had come upon a grossly swollen sheep. Large parts of its fur had been scraped to the hide by rocks and trees. He could close his eyes and see it, shorn by the river, then cast aside.

  “He said for me to tell you he’d see you soon.”

  Gus paused, his spoon halfway to his mouth, wondering what “soon” meant to his father.

  At school the sound of the river often drowned out Dr. Hall’s voice. There might have passed in the night a storm of such force that the banks were littered with wrack. He would be poking through it when Dr. Hall would call on him.

  “Say again, sir?”

  “I will not say again what you should have been paying attention to the first time.”

  Even the youngest children laughed.

  But in time he redeemed himself. Dr. Hall had assigned them the task of memorizing all the one hundred counties of North Carolina. They were given three days. Gus learned them all in an afternoon.

  Alamance, Allegheny, Alexander, Anson. On his way to school he timed his footsteps to the list. At the millinery after school he swept to its rhythm: Pasquotank, Perquimans, Person.

  He was the fourth person called upon. No one had yet gotten past Halifax. He stood. Names of counties flowed from his mouth like song. His classmates studied him, a mix of doubt and respect. Elaine Johnson, the smartest in the school, flummoxed, left out Davidson, went straight to Davie. Dr. Hall ordered her to sit but she stood, defiant, unwilling to abdicate her place to a freckly boy too poor to bring a lunch to school.

  School grew easier. Gus memorized complicated algebraic equations. Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” the Gettysburg Address. How he came to suddenly possess such talent was a mystery he did not care to ponder.

  When Gus was sixteen, he and Aunt Mattie went to visit his father. As Gus suspected, his father had never made it to Charlotte. He had gotten as far as Statesville. It took two hours for Gus and his aunt to get there on the bus that stopped now at the new Sinclair station in Lenoir.

  His father had married a widow with two small children and was a foreman in a furniture factory. Gus had not seen his father in four years. His new stepmother hardly looked at him. She was not young, but she was bony, which struck Gus as odd because both her boy and girl were plump. The children swirled around anyone or anything in their way as they chased each other through rooms and around tables and out the door.

  “Say, Gus,” said his father as they sat for a meal. “Any young ladies in the picture?”

  What picture? The picture in which only a burned-to-the-ground, only-thing-left-standing-was-the-chimney farmhouse remained of his father’s former life? Did his picture include Leslie? Gus thought to ask. Did it include him?

  On the bus home, Aunt Mattie said, “My land.” Then she was quiet for ten miles. Barns and silos flanked the roadside farmhouses. The fields were bordered by forest. On the far side of those trees, Gus needed there to be a river.

  In the back of the bus a colored woman sang a hymn he had never heard. It was unlike the hymns he knew from Mount Sinai Presbyterian Church. The melody seemed to come from the singer and not from some worn book in a rack affixed to the back of a pew. She sang the words as if every one were new to her. And yet the song sounded as old
as the river.

  Outside, it was late autumn. Gus cracked the window an inch. Men tended to barrels of burning leaves in their side yards. This was the farthest he’d ever been from home.

  “You needn’t visit again unless you want,” said Aunt Mattie when they got home.

  “I don’t want,” said Gus.

  A few months after his graduation, in the fall of 1916, Gus came home from the millinery to find Dr. Hall in the parlor, sitting stiffly on the scratchy love seat that even Aunt Mattie admitted was uncomfortable. He held a cup of tea.

  “Sit for a minute, Augustus,” she said. “Dr. Hall’s come by with something to tell you.”

  Gus thought it must be bad if she needed to use his too-big name.

  “I should think you would have something to say about it as well,” said Dr. Hall.

  “We are in agreement,” said Aunt Mattie in a way that revealed to Gus her ambivalence.

  Dr. Hall knew him as the boy who announced his late arrival by beating his boots against the top step of the schoolhouse. So why was he here drinking tea, a saucer balanced on his knee?

  “Augustus, son, I wonder what plans you have now that you have graduated.”