Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  “Just tell me does she breathe,” I said to Mr. McQueen. I could not look up. I had my eyes closed and my arms around myself, and I hugged myself as hard as he had hugged me. I could hear him speaking to her, but it was as if through a wild coyote wind. They seemed to be miles away. Of earth and above it. With all the energy I had left, I sent my voice above the roaring.

  “Does she live,” I asked. In the whistling wind there came a voice, thin, broken, Elise: “After a fashion,” it said. “After a fashion, she lives.”

  4

  GUS MCQUEEN

  Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, March 1917

  Nights in the teacherage, in those weeks following Elise’s accident, Gus watched the pages of the Kiowa County News lining the walls ripple from the wind Lorena told him her sister called “coyote.” He tried to write letters to his aunt. Dear Aunt Mattie, Please forgive my long silence. I think of you often and with love. Thank you for the postcards.

  Every sentence he wrote, he crossed out. Every page he managed to finish, he crumpled and tossed into the fire.

  Pulling his chair close to the stove, wearing gloves and a coat over his pajamas against the chill, he felt the weight of all he wanted his aunt to know, which was not everything. He would never tell her how he used to think he had only two choices, bad and worse. Mud or briar scratch. Sweeping up ribbon snippets at the millinery or Lone Wolf, Oklahoma. She’d not cotton to such a bleak view. Work through it, he imagined she’d say. Put your head down, boy, and push.

  But nor could he tell her—or anyone, ever—how, at some point after Elise wandered off into the storm, his choices seemed the opposite: wondrous and excellent. He could not tell anyone this because there was only one choice and it was excellent and it was Lorena.

  He could say it was Lorena’s sudden shivering that led him to stop The Beatitudes at exactly the place where Sandy was struggling to free himself from the fence, leading them to find Elise (after a fashion) alive. He could say Elise was alive because of Lorena.

  He could also say that it was his little brother who showed him where to look.

  Gus had only a couple of memories of his little brother. Once, they were down by the river, and Gus had to keep pulling pebbles out of his brother’s mouth. Another time, Leslie and Gus were playing in the yard, and Leslie fell and hit his head on the side of a low wall, and their father, who was smoking his pipe and reading the paper on the porch, came running over, scooped him up, and did a curious thing: he ran in circles, round the house. Both he and Leslie were crying, Leslie screaming, and Gus’s father in that terrible guttural way that some men cry, as if the emotion driving their sobs is coming from their intestines. Round and round they went, until Gus went inside, got a rag, wet it, stood in a place in the yard where his father was in danger of wearing a path in the grass, and on the next loop passed his father the rag.

  In Hibriten, oddly—for that is where all memories of his brother were contained—Gus began to forget him. Perhaps his death was colored by how little attention their father paid to it. There was barely a funeral. Gus remembered only standing in the cemetery—it was fall and the wind whirlpooled leaves into drifts alongside the cemetery walls—and looking at the simple marker his father had ordered (instead of making it himself, of which he was more than capable) and thinking, Is that all he gets? Their mother got new rooms, a pond, a bridge, benches. She got a fireplace built from river rocks Gus’s father spent months collecting. After the fire, the chimney still stood. Leslie got his name and some numbers carved into a slab that appeared to be more petrified wood than marble.

  But since Gus had been in Lone Wolf, he thought of Leslie almost daily. Was it the bond between the Stewart girls that made him miss his brother so keenly? Sometimes he felt Leslie alongside him, usually fleeting, a sudden gust on a windless day. But one day he came to Gus and lingered, and it was the day Gus needed him most, the day Elise Stewart got lost in the storm.

  Elise was intelligent and made good marks, though her sister was far more the scholar. Lorena was the smartest in the school, smarter, Gus worried, than he was, whereas Elise would answer a question about, say, geography, by quoting from a newspaper article that had nothing to do with geography. Gus found it disorienting and not a little annoying at first, as it seemed to him that Elise was, in her roundabout way, making fun of him. And maybe, also, of geography.

  But Gus quickly came to relish her departures. Teaching was a chore. Even though Mr. Hall was a sound model (though Gus did not see it at the time), Gus had not been to college, and no one ever taught him the first thing about how to teach. From the start, he was behind. He had fallen into the habit, on nights when he was kept awake by anxiety over the next day’s lesson plan, of rising in the middle of the night, starting a fire in the classroom, and filling the board with numbers and figures—dates to memorize, division problems to solve—until it was time for him to shave, dress, and ring the bell. He would have to move out of the teacherage when the term was over. It was not good to work and sleep in the same drafty quarters. Nor was it possible to hold the attention of twelve children between the ages of seven and seventeen for six hours on no sleep.

  Because he’d paid so little attention to Dr. Hall when he was in school, it had not occurred to Gus that teaching required one to talk all day long. If it weren’t for arithmetic and handwriting and reading, which the students performed silently at their desks, he would have likely had to have his tonsils out before Christmas. This was another reason that Elise Stewart’s impromptu departures were a wonderful diversion. Her questions, so wildly off topic and sometimes personal (What is the name of your horse? she asked him once during arithmetic) saved him from being bored by the words out of his mouth. Flustered by Elise’s odd questions, he found himself responding to her as Gus McQueen rather than his idea of who a teacher might be. It shocked him, and when the shock wore off, he realized it pleased him.

  The day Elise disappeared, it was said to be six below. Just walking from the barn to the schoolhouse, the wind, laced with tiny biting ice crystals, penetrated every layer he wore. When Lorena confessed that Elise had taken her horse and headed out into the storm, he had no choice but to search for her. He’d no time to consider the story behind her departure, and it never was explained to him by either girl. All he knew was that it involved research for a play Elise was writing based on a local murder. That was as much as he understood and none of it made much sense.

  Lorena insisted she accompany him on the search. She could be quite bossy in a manner, which, that day, seemed to help. She kept up her banter in the most difficult conditions. She’d even asked Gus what, in his opinion, was the point of life. They spoke of Elise delivering mail to prairie dog villages. Nothing made sense and yet in the frigid wind, her body pressed against his, words, no matter their meaning, seemed vital. Conversation kept them breathing and it gave them hope. But within the hour, Lorena commenced to shivering so badly, Gus saw no choice but to stop and wrap her in his arms. He had it in mind to save them both, for it seemed they were to die there, having failed to find her sister.

  The snow had lightened up to the point where they could see a farmhouse in the distance, but it was windy still and somehow even colder.

  Gus had never kissed a girl, or touched one. Lorena’s entire body bucked. One shivers to regulate body temperature—Gus had read so in a book—but this seemed more like a seizure. He wound his arms around her and pulled her toward him. Through the many layers he felt her breasts flatten against his chest, and with guilt did Gus feel things he had only felt in dreams erotic and not always nocturnal. He reminded himself that they were in danger. Embracing the most intelligent and also the most attractive girl in school was, he knew, wrong. But he had to save himself to save Elise. He needed Lorena’s warmth and she needed his. He realized he could claim, ever after, to their children (he was shocked that he thought of children at a time like this, but he felt also relieved, as he’d never considered it before and had already, at nearly nineteen, c
onsigned himself to the lone wolf category; also, it occurred to him later that this is where people’s minds naturally drift in the face of death—the children they will have if they survive) that the first time they embraced, they held on to each other for life. He might even say “dear life” even though he knew it to be an overly familiar phrase.

  And then he felt Leslie’s presence. And heard his voice. It was both high and hoarse, an aftereffect of his ceaseless coughing in the days before he died, and Gus recognized it immediately.

  Look up, Leslie said, and Gus did.

  Now to the left.

  Gus swiveled his head stiffly.

  See there?

  Good heavens, Gus said, for there at the edge of the visible world stood Sandy.

  Fortunately the horse was coal black and not the color of sand, as Elise, in one of her figments, had claimed. He’d strayed, disoriented, from the road and encountered some barbed wire hidden by the drifts. It turned out he’d ripped his flank open, likely in an attempt to free himself from the fence. Later that day, Sandy had to be put down.

  As for Elise, she was slumped against the horse’s crest, barely conscious. “Just tell me is she alive,” Lorena said into Gus’s shoulder, but Elise heard her and said, “After a fashion,” her wit suggesting she was far more alive than not.

  But the exposure took its toll. Elise lost four of her toes on one foot, one on the other, and the very tip of her nose to frostbite. Also a finger.

  They got her quickly to a farmhouse and a boy was sent for the doctor, who turned out to be a veterinarian. He lived nearby and was apparently often called upon to tend to the medical needs of families in the vicinity. Gus and Lorena could be of no help because they were themselves suffering from exposure. They were fairly standing in the hearth, covered head to toe in quilts, drinking tea spiced with spirits. Gus retained all his digits, as did Lorena. They had each other or they would have suffered similarly. And Gus had Leslie, whose presence that day felt so real that he came close to telling Lorena that it was his little brother who saved the life of her little sister. But he did not tell her. Instead, much later, he told her sister.

  Soon after the event, there was a write-up of the incident in the local paper. Lorena told Gus that Elise, who was given to quoting the local paper at will and often at odd and inappropriate times, had not read the article and had no plans to.

  “The goal of life is never to appear in the local paper. Please wake me up when my name appears in the pages of the New York Herald,” Elise told her sister after the article appeared.

  LOCAL GIRL LOST IN STORM

  Dramatic Rescue by Schoolteacher and Sibling. Mystery Lies at the Heart of Her Disappearance from School. Horse Wounded and Put Down by Local Veterinarian. Father, Having Lost Two Children to Prairie Fever, Puts Incident in Perspective.

  A LONE WOLF girl was found semiconscious on the back of her horse during last Thursday’s record-setting blizzard. Elise Stewart, 15, was discovered in a pasture alongside the Hobart Road, approximately four miles north of Lone Wolf. Her sister, Lorena Stewart, and Augustus McQueen, headmaster of Lone Wolf School and a fairly recent arrival from the Carolinas, are credited with locating the girl just moments before Precious Life would have surely left her.

  Efforts to determine why the girl left school and where she was going are as of yet unsuccessful. Neither her sister nor her schoolmaster would consent to an interview with the News, which leaves her reasons for setting off in a storm characterized by howling wind and heavy snow that rendered visibility to mere inches, a befuddling mystery to all.

  “She just disappeared,” said Edith Gotswegon, 17, of Lone Wolf, who is due to graduate in May and plans to continue her studies at the university in Norman. “She asked to be excused, but apparently, instead of proceeding to the facilities, she went and got on that horse and rode away.”

  O. E. Stout, local veterinarian, who was fortunately at home with his family on Thursday, responded to a call from young Leo Manzarack, son of Paul and Alma Manzarack, who live a quarter mile north of where the girl was found. Young Leo, truly a hero in this tragic tale, was sent by horseback into the storm to fetch the doctor.

  “Poor thing was on the door of death itself,” said Mrs. Manzarack. “We sent Leo off after the doctor, who lives but a mile from us. Although he is an animal doctor, I trust him to see to any of my children.”

  Dr. Stout allowed that he is occasionally asked to treat humans but, as he is not licensed to do so by the state of Oklahoma, confines his practice to animals, mostly cattle and horses.

  “I’ve not seen a worse case of frostbite,” said Dr. Stout. “In most cases it is prudent to wait a few weeks to see if the tissue repairs itself. But the young girl was not wearing shoes, and as a result, the frostbite was severe in several of her toes and one finger as well. I hesitate to offer more of my professional opinion, but I will say that it did not look good for this young girl.”

  “As for the horse, it appeared to have gotten caught up in some barbed wire. In disentangling itself from the fence, it sustained such injuries that I was forced to put him down.”

  Dr. Stout himself delivered the girl to the hospital in Hobart. There she recuperates, in the care of the fine staff and in the presence of her sister and parents, Dorothy and Harold Stewart of Gotebo Road, Lone Wolf.

  Though Mrs. Stewart declined to comment, Mr. Stewart, caught by a reporter from the News while taking a pipe in front of the hospital Saturday said, “She is of hearty stock and will rise and thrive, as she is a Stewart. It is a misfortune, but we have suffered far worse.”

  Later Elise would point out that it was her ring finger she’d lost to the elements. She would shrug and declare she had no use for it anymore. Who would marry a woman with five toes and a divot on her nose? Elise would ask Lorena, who grew embarrassed at any mention of Elise’s “condition,” partly, Gus suspected, out of guilt for letting her leave the classroom.

  Lorena was not the only one who felt guilty. There was a moment, early on in his tenure, when Gus was lecturing the class on the Natchez Trace. He looked up to find Elise staring at him so intently, it was obvious she had a question for him, and an important one. Rather than tend to the matter after class, he called on her to speak to the origins of the Natchez Trace. She didn’t care about the Natchez Trace and neither did Gus. This was the moment when he began to fail Elise and also the moment he realized that he was bound to fail them all, and himself, daily.

  He had come to Lone Wolf because it had seemed the lesser of two bad choices. He could have said no to Dr. Hall. Aunt Mattie would not have minded had he stayed. But he came, and despite the difficulties he faced in the classroom, he was not ready to leave.

  In the hospital Elise felt hemmed in, Gus was sure, and he took Lorena to visit her three times a week and on Sundays. It was appropriate, for he was the schoolteacher. His profession afforded him a measure of respect in the community he did not feel he had earned. A mere working man, transplanted to the area from anywhere farther than Lawton, would have to labor for years to attain the same level of trust from the citizens of Lone Wolf. Yet here goes young Master McQueen, riding off down the middle of Main Street, taking a right on the Hobart Road with the prettiest of his students (he could think that, it was okay to do so, because he was imagining what the people on the sidewalk thought), and of course it was all proper, her arms wrapped around his stomach just above his waist and often, on the return trip, late afternoons when The Beatitudes grew weary and his pace sluggish, her head asleep on the shoulder, her body rubbing against his own, a friction in rhyme with their travel.

  Gus did not think that being a teacher made him an upstanding citizen and it certainly did not make him unassailable. But why, leaving town with Lorena clinging to him, did he feel guilty? Lorena’s mother was staying with friends in Hobart until Elise recuperated from her surgeries and was discharged, and it wasn’t as if her father was going to give up his horse to let Lorena go see her sister.

&nbs
p; The weather had warmed up. The snowbanks in the fields were broken with patches of brown—first knee-high dried-up cornstalks and later splotches of mud on the furrows in the roadside pastures. Starlings gathered on the bare branches of the trees, backlit by a sun that turned the remaining snow into white gold.

  On the way home, when the sun descended toward the edge of the prairie, the temperature dropped, and sometimes they shivered, but they were not in danger. So why did Gus so often feel as if they were being followed?

  “What are you always looking at?” Lorena said one afternoon. They’d just left town and Gus kept switching his head around to see Lone Wolf shrinking in the distance.

  “You are so quiet, I thought you had fallen off.”

  “I just this minute spoke.”

  “After which came some silence.”

  “I was waiting for you to speak. There is a name for this: conversation. You ought to teach it to some of my classmates. It would be new to them and far more helpful than the Magna Carta.”

  “Magna Carta means ‘great big cart.’ It is helpful to know that when you go to the wainwright for a new cart.”

  “Never order the Magna Carta?”

  “Unless you have the means.”

  “Not likely, for us at least. Father says our land is cursed. He claims he was gypped.”

  “Did he not win the land in a lottery?”

  “He did, but it doesn’t matter. It would not matter if the land were as fertile as Mrs. Gotswegon, mother of Edith and eight others not unlike her. Father is no farmer.”

  “Nor was my father. He gave up after two years and went to work in a factory.”

  “What was made by your father in this factory in North or South Carolina?”

  “It is North and you know that. You just keep mixing them up to rile me. He made barrels and casks.”