“I work over at Caison’s Millinery shop. For now,” he added, conscious that this was not a suitable answer.
Dr. Hall nodded at the “for now” and told Gus he would come to his point.
It is just like Dr. Hall to tell you he would come to his point instead of coming to it, he thought he might say later to Aunt Mattie, when Dr. Hall had made his point and Gus had politely declined to be a part of anything he had to offer. But then he remembered that Aunt Mattie had already declared herself in agreement with the man.
“I have an old friend who has asked me to put forth someone willing to become a teacher in his community,” said Dr. Hall. “You have, I think, some talent for it.” Then, as was his nature, he qualified his already qualified compliment by saying that his talent was slow to reveal itself and that there was much about his intellect that remained undisciplined and that teaching, above all, called for expert organizational skills and was therefore many jobs in one. He began to list them: moral counselor, physical education instructor, secretary, in some cases janitor, in others carpenter. The list continued. Gus wondered if Dr. Hall’s goal was to discourage him.
Aunt Mattie was staring at Gus as if he’d gotten a girl pregnant. This she might have had an easier time believing.
“The school in question is in Oklahoma.”
“You said nothing to me about Oklahoma,” said Aunt Mattie.
“My apologies if I failed to mention it,” said Dr. Hall. “I thought I’d gauge the boy’s interest first.”
“Is it so bad off in Oklahoma that they have to come this far back east to find someone to teach their children?” Aunt Mattie asked.
Dr. Hall’s smile was familiar to Gus in a way that made him angry. It was the smile he gave Eustace Lackey when Eustace announced he was dropping out of school with only three weeks left.
“As I understand it, the community is made up of mostly cotton farmers and some Kiowa Indians. The climate is not hospitable. There are dust storms and tornadoes. And the winters are quite cold. I have this on authority of my friend, C. H. Griffith. He is a banker. Quite successful. He has been open with me about the limitations and hardships of the place.”
“Perhaps this is a position for someone more seasoned,” said Aunt Mattie.
Gus tried to catch his aunt’s eye, but she was studying Dr. Hall with something between a beam and a glare.
Dr. Hall was talking about the war in Europe now. He was saying that there was talk of exemptions for clergy and perhaps they would see fit to add teachers to the category since, to his mind, teachers were as much responsible for the building of character as the ministry. Gus had given no thought to the war.
Dr. Hall had stopped talking. He was looking at Gus.
“Does this town have a name?” asked Gus. He did not care if his tone was impertinent. He understood that the moment Dr. Hall explained the purpose of his visit he was to become a teacher now, regardless of what he wanted. He had never given a moment’s thought to the notion. The type of learning recognized by Dr. Hall as successful came late to him, as Dr. Hall himself had said. His sudden shining was due only to his ability to memorize, which in Dr. Hall’s classroom, so driven by the rote, equaled erudition. But Gus knew that memorization had nothing to do with imagination—knew, in fact, that it might well be imagination’s enemy.
“Lone Wolf,” said Dr. Hall. “Named, I understand, for a leader among the Kiowa Indians.”
“Lone Wolf,” said Aunt Mattie. She shook her head.
Dr. Hall said, “Do you have any questions, Augustus?”
“Only,” Gus said, “when do they need me to start?”
Even though he told her not to, Aunt Mattie rose at four the morning he left. She had fried bacon, boiled coffee. She’d made lunch: a hunk of bread, some side meat, a piece of pound cake, a bruised peach. The sight of a packed lunch waiting for him on his last day with her might have made him angry—all those years of midday hunger—but Gus could hold nothing against her. She married at sixteen and moved with her husband to this farm where she wrung the necks of chickens chased down in a yard she swept with branches. Always in her apron, yet she kept china and a thinly stuffed horsehair love seat for company that rarely came.
“Shall I write to your father?”
Gus sat at the table, blowing into his mug. He sipped, sifting the grounds from his lips with his tongue.
“I suppose so. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“I will write to him,” she said, spreading blackberry jam on a biscuit.
Gus, watching her work, understood that he would probably never see her again. For some reason he was embarrassed by the thought.
“I best be going,” he said. “If I eat any more, they might not let me on the train.”
“Gus?” she said. She turned around and took off her apron. “You never once asked about your mother.”
As he stood, he’d been thinking about the river. There would be other rivers but none like the first that had beckoned as it repelled.
Gus sat.
“Where to start?” she said, but she started right in, saying how smart she was, Gus’s mother, how much she loved Gus.
“I knew her since she was eight. I quit school after grade six, but she went all the way through. She made your father wait to marry until she finished. But loving was her real talent. There aren’t many people in this world who are brave enough to give themselves over to it. You’ve heard the word ‘headlong’?”
Gus nodded. Aunt Mattie sat. Why was she telling him this now? She must have felt too that they would never see each other again. And so she packed his lunch. And so she sat with him and said, “Your mother met my brother, and my Lord, it was like a war waged inside of her. You could just about see the sides of her, the one that wanted so much more than this”—it would take years for Gus to figure out what his aunt meant by “this”—“and the headlong way she felt for the first time, fighting each other. It was in her eyes and it was in the way she walked down the street with him. I used to follow them. Something in her made her just up and stop, right in the middle of the sidewalk. People had to go around her. She’d just stand there.”
Aunt Mattie stopped talking. She looked almost sheepish.
“You might wonder why I followed them?”
She looked down at her coffee. She held up her mug.
“Do you want to take these along?”
They were tin. His teeth clinked against them. He hated the way they made everything, even her strong coffee, taste metallic. He didn’t want them, but he nodded yes, please. He studied her eyes, her lips. Gus didn’t care why Aunt Mattie followed his mother; he only wanted to know why his mother stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. What was she looking at? What was she looking for?
Thirty seconds of silence. He heard the creak of the house settling farther into the earth and decided something of his mother was waiting for him in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma. He could hear it, idling now on the tracks, steaming, whistling, impatient.
“I’d love the cups,” he said, knowing she would hop right up, as she did, and wrap them carefully in cloth for his journey.
3
LORENA STEWART
Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, January 1917
“And where is your sister?” said Edith Gotswegon when Elise did not return to the classroom in ten minutes’ time.
“She might fallen in,” said Andrey the Bulgarian. His grammar irritated me and I was already in a panic over Elise’s disappearance, so I asked him why did he not pay attention and learn English.
It was during spelling. Mr. McQueen had called out the word catastrophe. Joseph Womack had put an s before the first t. Cast-astrophe. Perhaps Joseph had coined a word to fit the matter at hand, for what was soon to come was beyond catastrophic.
Elise was at the very least saddling Sandy by then.
Mr. McQueen put down his dictionary.
I have always thought it might be far more instructive and informative to teach both reading and spelli
ng (as well as current events) by studying the Kiowa County News. I myself have learned a great deal from it, obviously, as Elise and I spent many a day and night poring over its articles and committing some to memory, and it would do my classmates well, especially the Bulgarians, to be more knowledgeable about the goings-on in this town. I thought to broach the subject with Mr. McQueen, but then I remembered announcing that I was in need of the outhouse. How Elise had shamed me, asking me if I needed to go in front the entire class, but I would come to believe I deserved it, as I never should have said what I said about Mother indulging her. It was mean and not true, since Mother, stricken stiff by grief, was not really capable of indulging anyone. She had suffered, it was true, and grief does not let go easily, and yet who had not lost children or kin, and did she not bear equal responsibility to those still with her? I could go on about my struggles to understand, sympathize, and forgive her, but I will leave that for later, the story at hand—my sister’s having ridden off into the blizzard of the century—being far more pressing, not to mention dramatic in nature.
I will say first, however, that it was, oddly enough, this very moment—wondering over what to do about Elise, and annoyed at the ignorance of my classmates, and somewhat impatient with the methodology of Mr. McQueen, who it turned out had no more training as a teacher than I have as a blacksmith, aside from having memorized the one hundred counties of South or North Carolina—that I decided to become an educator myself.
But at present I was in quite the cast-astrophe. Edith Gotswegon and her ilk would not forget that I had declared myself in need of the facilities, and with every passing second, it became more obvious that Elise had made good on her intention to travel to Hobart. I saw no way out without embarrassment. I could not very well stand up and say to Mr. McQueen, “Excuse me, but Elise has taken Sandy and ridden into the blizzard on her way to Hobart to visit various saloons.”
But what other way was there to save my sister from her stubborn plan? I did not ask to be the oldest child, but (unlike my mother) I was not going to abandon my responsibility to Elise despite the short-term suffering it would cause me.
And yet I waited. Precious minutes passed. The snow thickened as the wind was of the stripe Elise called coyote. Why were we even allowed to come to school that day? Aside from the Bulgarians, who were from Bulgaria, only those within a short walking distance were present: the Gotswegon girls, Edith and Ethel; the Miller boys; Edna and Willy Constantine—city folk, we called them, though Lone Wolf is hardly a metropolis. And yet to Elise and me, town was exotic. Sidewalks, alleyways, saloons, drugstore and millinery, post office and courthouse—Lone Wolf might as well have been Oklahoma City or Chicago.
“Mellifluous,” called out Mr. McQueen. I thought of Elise playing “Für Elise.” Not a technically difficult song to master, but Elise turned the sparkly highest notes into sleet on a windowpane, and her timing made me, listening in Mrs. Robertson’s parlor, feel as if I were levitating. Such great heights she reached, with such a simple melody. It likely helped that she told Mrs. Robertson that Beethoven wrote the piece for her. Mrs. Robertson was tolerant of Elise’s imagination but not my lack of talent. Mrs. Robertson was ancient, and her house smelled of cooked cabbage, and the doilies covering her stiff chairs were greasy. She was obviously well past the age where she should have been giving anyone instructions, yet I overheard her tell Mother that I played as if I were wearing oven mitts. Then, if that were not insult enough, she said that were the mitts removed, you’d still be left with a child with absolutely no ear. “Elise, however, on the other hand . . .,” she went on, but I walked out on the porch because I did not want to hear that Elise played like an angel. I had heard it before. There was nothing angelic about Elise, but there was something spectral about her being. She felt her way along, her eyes closed just for spite, her hands tied behind her back. I cannot say her mind was ever given to disciplined thought or sound reason. I know this sounds bold, but I believe she is as intelligent as she is because she had someone there to challenge her. I am not talking about Mr. McQueen, or Professor Smythe before him, whose opinion was that Elise was in some way “off.” I am not talking about Mother and I am certainly not talking about Father.
But into my ear, while covered from the cold winds of the prairie under the dark blanket, she whispered things that made my bones go away. She said things, things that might seem silly to others, that made me rise from the burden that was and is still my body. It was as if she herself never bothered with her body—never bothered to think about it, never bothered to compare it to others, to note its inadequacies. To her, it was like a skiff, bringing her from one shore to the other.
Others made fun of her. Edith Gotswegon told me that very morning while I stood by the stove warming myself that her youngest brother was a breached birth and some oxygen was cut off in the process, affecting his mind, and was it possible that Elise . . .
I walked quickly to the coatroom so as not to have to give her the pleasure of not answering her question, and that marked the end of my brief period of friendship with Edith Gotswegon.
I could not see through the windowpanes. When Elise first left they were frosted in the corners, but now the declining temperature had rendered them opaque. By the minute it grew colder, darker. The door to the stove was open as much to provide light as warmth.
Mr. McQueen asked Ella Holman, who was seven, how to spell facilitate. I had been having conflicting and somewhat strange-to-me feelings about Mr. McQueen, who I had come to learn was only two years my senior, but at that moment my feelings about him were neither conflicted nor strange.
It was the Bulgarian Elise favored, the moody one with the thick eyebrows, the one who the other boys coarsely referred to as “Damn,” who finally brought Elise’s disappearance to the attention of oblivious Mr. McQueen.
“Elise has never come from the outhouse yet.”
His grammar rankled, but my face burned for having let the Bulgarian do what I should have done myself, ten minutes earlier.
“He is right. She is still out there.”
I did not have to affect outrage, as I truly felt it—but at myself. Life presents many situations in which you might manipulate the emotions you feel about your own behavior in order to admonish others.
“In the blizzard,” I added, as if anyone could forget the storm. “I asked to accompany her and was denied.”
Mr. McQueen appeared unusually confused. At that moment I marked him as a model of what not to do if a similar situation were to rise in my educational career.
“I thought you were using the outhouse.”
“Clearly I am right here.”
“But didn’t you say . . .”
“No matter what I said, sir.” (I had never referred to him as “sir.”) “My sister is out there and we need to find her.”
“I don’t think it’s exactly a disaster,” he said. “She’s likely just waiting out the worst of the storm in the shelter.”
“That is preposterous. We rode four miles here in this weather and she had no need of shelter save for a blanket.” I acted offended, as if my sister were far too refined to seek shelter from a blizzard in an outhouse.
“Well, go and fetch her,” he said.
“I would require you to go with me.”
“Why?”
“In case she has lost her way. Visibility, as you can and cannot see if you look out the window, is close to zero.”
The class began to whisper. Chief among the susurrous current, I recognized the breathy voice of Edith Gotswegon.
“Very well,” said Mr. McQueen. He closed his dictionary and looked around the room. “Edith, why don’t you read aloud from Mr. Franklin’s autobiography.”
“My mother said he was not at all a gentleman.”
“Your mother is not here,” said Mr. McQueen, which shocked Edith into obeying.
In the coatroom I could not find my scarf. I took Edith Gotswegon’s, which was unattractive, but I was not preparin
g to walk the runway in a Paris fashion house.
I debated telling Mr. McQueen everything then, but it seemed better to play along with the outhouse lie, at least until, after knocking and calling my sister’s name, he wrenched the door open against the several inches of snow blocking it and saw that it was empty.
“Let’s check the stable,” I said, for I was not going to stand in the freezing cold describing the murder of Charley Sherman by L. C. Ivent and why it was of interest to Elise.
Seeing Sandy’s empty stall, Mr. McQueen asked where my sister might have gone. It was not his fault that everything out of his mouth struck me as dumb and obvious, since I had foreknowledge that it was now time to share.
Which I did, though leaving out some details, such as my cruel words to her that morning and the dispute we had over the facts of the case of Ivent versus Sherman.
“So she’s on her way to Hobart,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Surely she’s turned back? In this weather you cannot see your horse beneath you. She would be frozen through by now.”
“You don’t know my sister.”
He looked at me oddly then, as if he thought that perhaps he did know her. I had noticed that he was generous in entertaining her inappropriate comments, but Elise had a way of taking strangers by surprise, and to be frank, I had indulged myself in a version of Mr. McQueen that suited my own needs. I had not paid much attention to the things he did or said to others, even my own little sister.
“I don’t, it’s true.”
“She’ll not turn around.”
“But the horse will.”
“The horse, well . . . Elise feels that she can communicate with the horse.”
“Many riders feel that way about their mounts.”
“This is different.”
“I do remember her telling me something about the horse coming from the seashore.”
“That’s the half of it.”
“What is the other half?”
“She is convinced the horse knows the way.”
“The way to where?”
Prairie Fever Page 5
