Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  “Barrels and casks are in high demand. My father is incapable of steady work. He wastes hours discussing something he refers to as ideas with men similarly disinclined toward labor. He is unable to provide for us. If my mother did not have a little money of her own to keep us afloat, Elise and I would be in the poorhouse.”

  “You would have each other,” said Gus. As soon as he said it, he realized it was an insensitive thing to say. You will have each other to share a bowl of gruel and wear each other’s ragged clothing. And yet it was hard for Gus not to think of Elise and Lorena as “the Stewart girls,” though they did not really favor except in the nose. Elise’s hair was auburn and curly. Rarely did it seem to have come upside a brush. She wore what were obviously handmade clothes.

  Lorena’s hair was darker and straighter and she kept it perfectly coiffed. Her dresses too were homemade—there was not a store-bought article of clothing in the schoolhouse—but Lorena managed always to accessorize her outfit with, say, a scarf. Gus had never noticed scarves before. He wasn’t sure what their purpose was save to keep one’s neck warm, but Lorena wore them inside, when the woodstove was working so efficiently that the students had moved their desks to the corners of the classroom to avoid sweating. If Lorena sweated, he did not notice. Her eyes were darker than her sister’s, brown instead of green.

  But Lorena did not appear to be listening. She said into his neck (he felt her warm breath), “I want to go to college.”

  “Of course you do. And you should.”

  “There’s no money. Why did you not go?’

  Gus had considered it, especially after he displayed a flair for memorization and his grades began to improve. But with his father gone, he could not imagine telling his aunt he was leaving her to go off to college. Plus there was no money.

  “No money,” he said. “But you are smarter than I am.”

  He paused and turned to look at her, looking also over her head at the empty road behind them.

  “Don’t ever tell anyone I said that or I will flunk you. But they have scholarships available for people like you.”

  “I have written to the state university in Stillwater for information about scholarships,” said Lorena. “I plan on becoming a teacher.”

  Gus thought to ask if she liked to talk all day long. He thought to say, Do you care a fig about the French Indian War? But he said (after looking behind them once, quickly, and disguising his glance as an attempt to flick the hair out of his eyes), “You would make an excellent teacher. Far better than I.”

  “You have your moments.”

  “You are being generous,” said Gus.

  “I am not known for my generosity.”

  They were coming into Hobart. The road to the hospital was lined with saloons. Which one was L. C. Ivent’s? Gus often wondered but he would never ask.

  “Did you hear back from the university at Still Waters?”

  “Stillwater,” she said. “One word. Which leads me to believe there is no river there. Perhaps a pond.”

  Or a birdbath, Gus imagined Elise chiming in. He sometimes imagined her comments, which he missed. It was family only allowed still at the hospital, so he sat in the lobby and read, sometimes listening to strangers describe their ailments in a manner common to hospital waiting rooms the country over, Gus suspected.

  “The news was discouraging,” said Lorena. “I don’t think it is enough for me. I would have to work for a year and save much of what I made.”

  Waiting for Lorena in the lobby, Gus remembered running into C. H. Griffith in the barbershop. Mr. C. H. Griffith had asked Gus if he had any promising students. He ran the First National Bank of Lone Wolf and was chairman of the school board. He was jowly, prominent, and civic-minded. Perhaps he would be willing to invest in the future of a local youth. Lorena would be thrilled and she could get her degree and come back and take over Gus’s post, and Gus could go back to sweeping up ribbon, which he preferred to explaining the Magna Carta and the Natchez Trace, neither of which, at the end of the day, he gave a fig about.

  Gus would always appreciate Dr. Hall’s faith in him, for it had gotten him out of Hibriten. He loved the learning part of teaching, even when he learned things he did not give a fig about, but he knew he had no real talent for imparting the things he learned. The hollow gazes of the Bulgarian boys terrorized him, but so did the alertness of Edith Gotswegon and even Lorena. He was either boring them or failing to properly edify them. Every day, standing in front of the chalkboard, he felt as if he were on the stage of the local theater. He was playing the lead and he had forgotten his lines. Flustered, he often fell silent in the middle of making some point about Asia Minor. Teaching kept him up all night. Either he was worried about something he had said poorly or not said at all in class, or he was wondering what he was going to say the next day.

  But teaching had led him to Lorena, with whom he was spending many hours. She slumped against him, exhausted, on the slow return from the hospital in Hobart. He felt her body heating his and told himself if it weren’t for her (and Leslie), he might be dead. Surely Elise would be dead. Leslie had saved Elise, which meant he and Lorena had saved each other. He would not dare kiss her until she graduated, but somehow it had happened that they were unofficially courting. Most of their time together was spent traveling to the hospital in Hobart and back, but there was much pleasure in the going.

  “When Elise gets home and is able, and it comes spring, I will borrow a wagon and we will all go to the river,” he told Lorena one day on the way home. Lorena only smiled. The river was for courting. Every week back in late summer when Gus arrived in Lone Wolf, the Kiowa County News had listed the couples spotted frolicking on its banks. Frolicking meant picnicking, almost always with chaperones. But going to the river was for lovers.

  Not at all like the river back home, about which he had not told Lorena. It did not strike Gus as something she would find of interest. He was slightly sickened at the thought of the hours and hours he spent there, not crossing over. Foolish, lonesome, teenage longing, dragged out alongside an element passing always through. It was and was not a river. There were no snakes sunning themselves on boulders; there were only limbs and branches left lying across rocks by storm-swollen waters. There was once a washed-up sheep, but this was not the sort of detail that might intrigue Lorena. Lorena was too mature to be interested in washed-up sheep.

  Because her mother was so long lost in her grief, Lorena had little tolerance for sadness. A river-shorn sheep carcass was nothing but sadness swollen by weeks in the water.

  Gus decided to move out of the teacherage and rent a bungalow behind the Lutheran church. But he needed money. The teacherage had been free. He mentioned his plan to Lorena, who said he should come work for her father.

  Weren’t the Stewarts a plague of grasshoppers away from the poorhouse? He did not know how to politely say that he needed reliable and adequate income in order to afford his bungalow. So he said nothing.

  “You are wondering if Father can pay.”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “Mother will pay you.”

  “But I would not . . .”

  “You are wondering why Mother stays with a man so financially irresponsible if she has money of her own.”

  Gus did not attempt another sentence. She would only interrupt him to tell him what he was wondering, though he’d been wondering exactly those things she told him he had been wondering.

  “She loves him, I guess. Old Harold must have done something amazing to impress her once. She left college without a degree in order to marry him. She could have finished and gone on to have a career.”

  Gus said that she could still have a career of some kind.

  Lorena ignored his preposterous comment and said, “You are wondering why I don’t ask Mother to pay for my college. There is not so much money to both keep us afloat and pay for my higher education. Plus, Elise’s surgery has cost us considerably. But it is worth Mother’s paying you to do the thin
gs Father will not. At least tasks will be accomplished. Your father was obviously good with his hands. Did you inherit his handiness?”

  “He taught me how to make things.”

  “You would be mostly mending and repairing and replacing.”

  “Even better,” said Gus, who liked the notion of upkeep and maintenance, since his father had only been interested in building new things. Had the lightning his father claimed descended that day from a cloudless sky not incinerated all his attempts to circumvent grief, the many things he erected in his wife’s honor would have soon fallen apart. When Gus left, the benches were already tilting in soft soil and the bridge was missing several boards. Only the river-rock fireplace remained intact.

  “I will talk to him,” said Lorena. “First I will talk to Mother, but of course we must allow Father to think it his idea.”

  Gus, in turn, paid a call to Mr. C. H. Griffith, who received him in his office on the second floor of the bank building. It was well appointed in a manly way, with deep leather chairs smelling of pipe smoke, a fireplace, and an oil painting of Abraham Lincoln looking at once severe and confused.

  “Don’t tell me you’re in want of a raise already,” said Mr. Griffith. “Did you not just get off the train last week?”

  “The school year is nearly over,” said Gus. “I have survived my first Oklahoma winter.”

  “It was a doozy,” said Mr. Griffith. “Not representative, but good that your first was so rough. Your next thirty-odd will be easy.”

  “If I stay thirty-odd years in Lone Wolf, I will be expecting more than one raise.”

  Mr. Griffith laughed. His laugh was at odds with his body. It seemed to escape him rather than be cast boisterously in Gus’s general direction, which was what Gus expected from this portly and jowly banker. Maybe he was the rare man who could express the contradictions within him. Gus had never met a man like that, but he’d read about them in books.

  “If it’s not money, what could you possibly want from me?”

  “I am moving to a small bungalow on Fourth Street. Behind the church. I thought you should know.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Griffith. “Well, you’re not the first teacher to seek separate lodging. I would not care to sleep in the bank vault myself. Perhaps we can use the space to allow students from out in the country to stay over during bad weather. I heard about the Stewart girl. Tragic.”

  Gus thought to say that Elise was not attempting to get home from school, but he remembered that it was better for people to think that she was. Especially Mr. C. H. Griffith.

  “You were the one who found her?”

  “Her sister was with me. Lorena.”

  “I know the father. Harold Stewart is in the habit of dropping by. He fancies himself an inventor. Is the young girl getting along all right?”

  “She is due to be released from the hospital next week. Her sister goes to see her regularly. And her mother has taken rooms in Hobart to be with her while she recuperates. They say that Elise is adjusting well.”

  Gus thought this not exactly the right thing to say about Elise, for in no way could she be called well adjusted, though he realized he wasn’t sure what the phrase meant. To what was one supposed to so well adjust? Everything, more than likely.

  Mr. Griffith was talking about Elise. As cold as it was, he was saying, she was lucky to have lost only some toes.

  “Was there also a finger?” he said.

  “There was.”

  “Hmmm,” said Mr. Griffith, as if he were contemplating Elise’s lost finger.

  “It was her sister, Lorena, who found her, actually,” said Gus, betraying his little brother. Leslie had not come around since telling Gus where to look that day. What did it mean? Gus looked up at Abraham Lincoln in solidarity, for Gus was also confused and not at all well adjusted.

  “It’s the sister I wanted to speak to you about, sir,” Gus said. Mr. Griffith came close to smiling, but only close. His almost smile made Gus wonder if, like Lorena, he could see what Gus was wondering.

  “Last time I saw you, in the barbershop, you asked me if I had any good students. I have several.”

  “Philip Gotswegon’s girls are said to be top notch.”

  By Philip Gotswegon, Gus thought but did not say.

  “Yes, especially Edith, who knows exactly what she wants out of life, which is, as you know, a rare quality in an adolescent. But Lorena Stewart, I would say, is the more talented. She has the highest marks.”

  “Takes after her mother, I assume, though I have never met the woman. She must be the very picture of long suffering.”

  Gus thought it best to ignore this, for a variety of reasons.

  “Lorena would like to go to college, but there is no money.”

  “I don’t doubt that. Harold was in here the other day offering his entire spread as collateral for a loan to build an automatic goat-milking machine. Do you realize that if an Alberta clipper came through and held steady for a week, all the topsoil in this county would end up in the Gulf of Mexico?”

  “Certainly not much between here and there to stop it, as I understand.” Gus tried to recall the map of Texas. Were there mountains he did not know about? Had he just exposed his ignorance of geography?

  “You want me to contribute to this girl’s college fund.”

  “She wants to be a teacher. She would make a terrific one. She is patient and organized and she has a nimble mind. I had this idea, sir, that if you helped out with her schooling and drew up a contract specifying that she return to Lone Wolf and work for a period of time at a reduced salary in order to pay off—”

  “Why would she agree to work for a reduced salary?” said Mr. Griffith. His interruption was proof that Gus’s idea, though noble, was not going to be treated any differently than a plea to fund a goat-milking machine.

  “It does not take much to live in Lone Wolf if you lodge in the teacherage.”

  “And how will you afford not to live in it, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Gus did mind, but he said, “I plan to find work over the summer on a local farm,” careful to leave out whose farm.

  “I see.”

  Mr. Griffith opened a drawer and pulled out a pocketknife. He opened the blade and then flicked it closed. To Gus, this seemed to be a gesture better suited to a cowpoke. Gus imagined telling both Stewart sisters about it while miming the gesture with his hand.

  “Well, your finances are your own business. So long as you show up to school and teach the Bulgarians how to speak proper English, I don’t care where you live.”

  Gus started to say that the Bulgarians came to school only to sleep and to escape working in the fields, except for Damyan, who was deeply engaged. But it was clear that Mr. Griffith was not a fan of the Bulgarian people.

  “As to Miss Stewart: I have to say there is one thing I don’t understand about your proposal and that is, are you not in effect putting yourself out of a job?”

  “I hear there is talk of a countywide system.”

  Mr. Garrison flicked his pocketknife closed. “Did you read about it in that rag?”

  “Rag?”

  “The goddamn Kiowa County News.”

  Actually, Gus heard about it from Edith Gotswegon, who heard it from her father, who heard it from the barber, who was likely told it by Mr. Griffith. He did not think the Kiowa County News was a goddamn rag, but he did not want to admit his fondness for it any more than he wanted to defend the nation of Bulgaria.

  “I don’t recall reading it. I dimly recall overhearing it.”

  “The plans for consolidation are just beginning. It is a good ways off.”

  “More than four years?”

  “I would have to bring this up with the school board. Say it got out. What’s to stop every high school graduate in town from coming to me asking for the same deal?”

  “Maybe you ought not to take it before the board.”

  “You mean work out a loan with Harold Stewart’s daughter.”
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  “I believe in her.”

  “What if she fails out or decides she doesn’t care for college life?”

  “Neither is imaginable in this case, but I can understand your position. I will sign the note.”

  “You will sign the note,” said Mr. Griffith. His repeating it made it sound far more real—and reckless—than it had sounded out of Gus’s mouth.

  “Yes.”

  “And you will assume the loan if she decides to run off to Chicago to model dresses for Marshall Field’s catalog?”

  “She is more of a Sears and Roebuck girl.”

  “You must have the utmost faith in this child.”

  “She’s no child.”

  Mr. Griffith looked at Gus for far too long. Then he said, “I’ll have the papers drawn up. But it is crucial that you impress upon her the terms.”

  “Of course.”

  “I expect I’ll be seeing her father in here every other day now that I have agreed to fund his daughter’s education.”

  “Lorena doesn’t talk to her father.”

  “You know a lot about her,” C. H. Griffith said, flicking his blade.

  “I have been taking her to the hospital to see her sister. Her father is unable to take her because he is busy on the farm.”

  “I’m sure he is.” Gus looked at Abraham Lincoln, who looked severely down at them as if he disapproved of them both.

  A week later, when the family-only restriction was lifted, Gus went to see Elise. She was sitting up in the hospital bed, wearing a dress and her new special shoes, which were large, boxy, and very black. She told Gus that laudanum was great for passing the endless hours lying in a steel bed in an overheated room, but that it had unpleasant side effects, such as turning the music of the radiator into Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.

  “That doesn’t sound unpleasant.”

  “You know it?” Elise said, and he had to admit he did not. “Just as well,” she said, and pronounced it “busy.”

  “I told the nurse to turn it down so I might nap,” said Elise. “Anyway, it’s hardly practical, laudanum. Tell me all the schoolhouse gossip.”