“Edith Gotswegon has been accepted at the state university in Norman.”
“Lone Wolf will weep lonely tears as the blinking lights of the train stealing her away from us grow tiny on the track.”
He thought of telling her of his arrangement with C. H. Griffith if only to mimic the flicking open of the knife blade (she alone would appreciate it), but it was Lorena’s place to share this news, and besides, he had a pressing question. He had always wanted to ask Elise about the incident that occurred when he was discussing the origins of the Natchez Trace. He had written a letter to his aunt, which he stuck in a drawer, and in this letter he had described that moment when he looked up from his notes to see Elise staring at him imploringly. In his unsent letter, he cited this as a pivotal moment in his understanding of his lack of efficacy in the classroom.
Failures aside, he had long wanted to know what she was thinking at that moment. But Elise, in the manner of her sister, went on about the point of life. Unlike her sister, she had no real interest in the point of life and was easily dissuaded from discussing it.
Gus reminded her of the day he lectured on the Natchez Trace.
“I happened to look up at you. You had a look on your face. It seemed you had something important to say to me. Something urgent.”
Elise told him that he had treated the suffering of his drunken seatmate, Charlie Carter, in a manner cruel and dismissive. He had failed to hear—these were Elise’s words—the man’s “true cry.”
The phrase took Gus back to the day of the storm. He stood with his arms around Lorena, who was now, for all intents and purposes (though they’d yet to exchange a kiss), his Beulah girl. He remembered hearing his little brother’s voice, telling him where to look to find Elise. But Gus had a horrible thought: It wasn’t Leslie he heard. It wasn’t Leslie’s presence he felt. Leslie was dead. Gus barely remembered him, and he did not remember his mother at all.
The nurse came in and interrupted their discussion, which was fine with Gus. Elise had just said that she had yet to unleash her true cry upon the wilderness and Gus had begged to differ. He was about to say something he ought not, but here came the nurse to save him. Shoo, the nurse said to him, as if he were a rooster on her front porch. He loved this nurse.
He found Lorena in the lobby talking to her mother. Her father was there also, for they were to take Elise home later that day. Gus had started working on weekends for Mr. Stewart, who was as described. The first day on the job he had put it to Gus that he was an idea man. Other idea men dropped by and they gathered in the mouth of the barn talking about who knew what.
“How is she?” Elise’s mother asked.
“I would say she is ready to be sprung,” said Gus.
Mr. Stewart said he was past ready to stop being charged an arm and a leg to keep her there, which Gus found in questionable taste, given his daughter’s dwindled number of appendages.
Lorena was looking at him curiously. She said she would walk him out.
“Is everything okay?” she asked him once they were outdoors.
“I dislike hospitals,” he said.
“You’ve spent much of the last month visiting one.”
“The lobby is nothing like those sterile white rooms with their steel beds and streaky windows.”
“How did Elise seem?”
“She said laudanum was not practical.”
“In other words, she’s back to normal.”
“You’ve not told her about Stillwater,” Gus said, though she very well could have. He and Elise did not discuss Lorena.
“No. I’ve told only my parents. All I said was that you helped me procure scholarships. I said nothing about you signing the loan.”
“Okay,” said Gus.
“Oh, Gus, may I say again how grateful I am? You have saved me. You have given me hope.”
She was standing too close to him. Were they on The Beatitudes, making their slow way home, she could rub up against him and he would not mind for no one was looking but the starlings on the bare wintry trees and the occasional bored cow. But she was his student still.
Lorena did not seem to care. She touched his forearm in a way that made him realize, for the first time, that the paper he’d signed in C. H. Griffith’s manly office might as well have been a marriage license. First he had started courting Lorena without even asking her to go steady and now it seemed he was bound to her without having formerly proposed.
It did not make him sad or fearful. He had choices and one was wondrous and the other excellent, though he could not tell anyone this because there was only one choice and it was excellent and it was Lorena.
5
ELISE STEWART
Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, Summer–Fall 1917
Then she became Local Girl Lost in Storm. She had five toes, nine fingers, and 89 percent of her nose.
Mr. McQueen is not much.
Sandy is on the run. He has made it to the Mississippi River, where the boys stand around in mud-stained knickers and for a dime will wade into the water and stick their hands into holes in the bank and pull out long-whiskered catfish. Sandy has boarded a steamer bound for New Orleans. His accommodations are first class. He dines nightly with the captain, the first mate, and a lawyer from St. Louis who has it in his mind to purchase him, not knowing that he belongs to no one, never has, especially not Elise.
“I still have not had an idea,” Elise told the nurse in the Hobart Hospital.
“What’s that, dear?”
“You’d think that I’d have one now, if ever.”
“You just need rest.”
“Maybe on my deathbed one will come to me.”
“Hush,” said the nurse, and gave her more laudanum.
Elise remembered hearing Lorena say to Mr. McQueen, “Does she live?” Elise remembered thinking, Who is she? and then realizing that she was she.
In that moment, Mr. McQueen was her interpreter. Mr. McQueen was not much. Elise said (about the person her sister referred to as she), “After a fashion. After a fashion, she lives.”
Elise remembered parts of the day Local Girl Got Lost in Storm. For years, the day would come to her from faraway, like watching a storm approaching across the prairie: streaks of lightning followed by wild thunder followed by nothing. It was the nothingness that held her, not the sonic booms or the dramatic forks of lightning. The nothing parts when you are waiting for the next lightning bolt are the point of life, Elise said to Lorena in the hospital. Lorena shrugged and nodded at once, a gestural “maybe so” or perhaps an outright dismissal softened by the notion that her sister, now technically a cripple, must be indulged.
What do you remember of that day? they asked her. Who is “they?” Everyone but her mother, Lorena, and Mr. McQueen. And Damyan, who looked upon her with sadness, offering with his moony eyes his sincere condolences as well as Bulgarian devotion, which was by nature both tenuous and total.
She remembered her sister saying to Mr. McQueen, “Does she live?” But it did not even sound like a question. Why did she say Does she live? instead of Is she alive?
She remembered hearing in the whistling wind the singing of someone passing close by—they had strayed from the road, which was not visible, so thick was the snow, and Sandy had got stuck in the barbed wire, about which Damyan had proved prophetic—and thinking the singing resembled the voice of Big Idea. She remembered calling out to Big Idea, but the winds described in the local paper (of course she read it, she only pretended not to, she had committed it to memory, awful Edith Gotswegon referring to Sandy as “that horse,” how did Edith Gotswegon worm herself into the article, who asked her opinion?) as “howling” took away her Big Idea, swallowed it up.
She remembered being laid out on the farm table. The wife was calm; the husband, jittery. She saw three children peering down from a sleeping loft above the kitchen. The wife fed her sips of whiskey. Elise liked the way it warmed her stomach immediately, but that was all she liked about it.
Meanwhil
e Lorena warmed herself by the fire, as did Mr. McQueen. Elise did not hold it against them, leaving her alone on the table, as they were also suffering. They had come to fetch her. They too could have easily died. It wasn’t too shrewd, her lighting out for Hobart in the storm, though her body often did not obey her mind. The two sometimes behaved as if they’d not yet met. She wanted, needed to find out what some might consider a relatively minor detail about who operated a certain Hobart saloon, so that she might proceed with composing her play. Yet neither Lorena nor Mr. McQueen told anyone why she was trying to get to Hobart (both even refused an interview with the Kiowa County News), and when she realized it had become a great mystery, she wasn’t about to spoil it.
Laid out on the table, she watched Lorena and Mr. McQueen drink from steaming mugs. They were sharing a quilt as they stood by the fire. They were left behind as the farmer loaded her up in his shay and, with the horse doctor attending to her, took her to the Hobart Hospital.
After she recovered from hypothermia, the doctor came and determined that five of her toes and one of her fingers must take their leave of her, as well as the tip of her nose. She had not seen her toes or her finger because they were thickly bandaged, though she heard the hardened nurses gasp as the digits were uncovered, the tissue obviously blackened. She heard the word gangrene from the doctor and her mother held her hand, crying. Then there was ether and pain and days lying in the hospital bed, trying to forget the smell in the room when her useless toes were unwrapped.
Her mother stayed with her, sleeping slumped over in a chair. They gave Elise laudanum and then paregoric round the clock. She missed the laudanum. Her mother cried.
“I know, Mother,” she said. “But Sandy is on his way home.”
Her mother looked up.
“He is bound for New Orleans and from there he will make his way to the coast of Mexico on another ship.”
“Oh, Elise,” said her mother. “I thought we lost you.”
“But you did,” she said. “I was lost in the storm.”
Her father was there, at least according to the local paper. He took his pipe down to the lobby and reportedly said to the reporters, “We have suffered far worse.” He spoke to the sturdiness of the Stewart clan. One thing he did not do was share any of his ideas with the reporters, and for this Elise was grateful.
Of course she read the article. The nurses had brought it to her straightaway. She only said she didn’t read it to illustrate to Lorena that one should quit making pronouncements about the point of life. The point of life had nothing to do with the Kiowa County News or the New York Herald. Wake me up when my name appears in the New York Herald indeed. She had said such to humor Lorena, who claimed Elise was the one who ought to be humored.
Mr. McQueen came to see her in the hospital. He pulled his chair close. She looked at the perfect part in his hair. It stayed put, annoying her no end.
There’d been a thaw, the snow had melted, the sun was out, and Mr. McQueen had gained freckles riding and strolling about. Mostly he traveled back and forth to the hospital, though often he brought Lorena and stayed in the waiting room because it was family only allowed. This time he was allowed, and alone, which must mean they were letting her go home. He smelled of fresh air and of The Beatitudes.
“I need to ask you something,” said Mr. McQueen after a brief but vaguely satisfying update of schoolhouse gossip. Edith Gotswegon was going to university in Norman. Joseph Womack had been called to preach the word, which Elise knew for a fact he could do in his sleep.
“Yes?”
“Once, not long after I arrived here, I was lecturing on the origins of the Natchez Trace. I was, of course, reading from my notes.” (Before you started making up history altogether, Elise thought but did not say). “And I looked up and you were staring at me.”
“Was I? Of course I was. You were standing in front of me and you were the teacher.”
“Would that this required you all to look at me instead of out the window or at your desks. Anyway, you had a look on your face . . . I have not forgotten it. I tried to describe it in a letter to my aunt.” (He writes letters to his aunt in which he describes the looks on the faces of his students? This surprised Elise in the very best way.) “It seemed you had something important to say to me. Something urgent.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what it was?”
“Of course. I remember everything that ever happened.”
And lots that did not, Lorena would assert were she present.
“What was it you needed to ask me?”
Charlie Carter wakes and cries out for his Beulah girl. She has thrown him over for another and he drinks enough to sleep through three states, and why could we not talk about that instead of how the Natchez Trace was blazed by prehistoric animals before man arrived, as if man counts for anything?
“I wanted to know what is the point of life.”
“Elise,” said Mr. McQueen.
“Yes?”
“No you did not.”
“Charlie Carter,” said Elise. She wasn’t ashamed. She was crippled. Now she could say anything and who cared? Before they thought her odd and listened and laughed. Now that she was maimed, they would pay no attention to her. She could stand naked in front of the First National Bank of Lone Wolf and recite the articles of the constitution in hog Latin, and if they even noticed, they would say, “That young lady lost her digits.”
Mr. McQueen looked puzzled. If only the part in his hair were irregular, his confusion would be charming.
“What about him?”
“His Beulah girl!” Her voice was hoarse when raised and it shocked her.
“Yes?”
“It wasn’t a joke. He suffered, did Charlie Carter.”
“I did not tell it as a joke.”
“You told it as a humorous anecdote.”
“It was not amusing to you?”
“Not in the least. The man suffered terribly. He cried out, but no one heard his true cry.”
Mr. McQueen said, “And do you think it generally true that no one hears our true cry?”
“On that I have an opinion, but I choose to withhold it, since I have yet to let mine loose on the world.”
Mr. McQueen sat back in his chair. He appeared to go somewhere else in his mind. She wasn’t sure where it was, but it wasn’t this hospital room with its white-tile walls that were always inexplicably wet.
“Oh, but you have.”
“When?”
“The day you got lost in the storm.”
“How was that my cry of truth?”
“Well, it wasn’t about research for a play based on a murder in Hobart, for starters.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No,” said Mr. McQueen.
“Well, do tell.”
But the nurse came in. She told Mr. McQueen that visiting hours were over. This particular nurse was her favorite, but at this moment she hated her. She wished she had never been born.
Mr. McQueen said his goodbye. He left her there with five toes and nine fingers. The nose was of no real consequence to Elise.
The next time she saw Mr. McQueen was at her house. It was summer and school was out. (She had not returned, but she had gotten credit for the year, because Lorena had brought home lesson plans that Mr. McQueen had specially designed for her, which included amusing questions, like list your favorite stripe on the US flag and say why it is your favorite without employing adjectives, etc.) He was wearing dungarees and a dirty shirt. His boots were dusty. Lorena brought him into the parlor, where Elise was playing “Für Elise” on the piano her mother had waiting for her when she came home from the hospital.
“Elise,” said Lorena.
She kept playing. She was almost to her favorite part, where Ludwig van Beethoven, who had written the song for her, lingers adagio on two notes, slowing down so much you worry it’s over and your heart yearns for the solace of music over the preternatural silence of the prairie.
/> Elise thought herself even more capable of evoking this yearning now that she was shy a finger. A weaker pianist would have given up after going under the saw. Maybe Mr. McQueen could appreciate her transcendence. He might be the only one. Lorena seemed fascinated by it, in the way she was fascinated by the Siamese Twins the carnival brought to town, but she was also slightly embarrassed, especially when Elise played in front of others, others being, in this case, Mr. McQueen.
“Elise,” Lorena fairly hollered.
Elise turned around. There stood Mr. McQueen, dressed up like a farmhand.
“Hello, Mr. McQueen.”
“Elise, you play beautifully.”
“It helps that the song is named for her,” said Lorena.
“Actually, written for me,” said Elise.
“Even though it was written almost a hundred years before your birth,” said Lorena.
“So? What great artist thinks only of the living?”
Despite herself, Lorena giggled. Mr. McQueen was beaming.
“I never knew,” he said.
“Knew what?”
“That you possessed such musical talent.” He turned to Lorena. “And do you play as well?”
“By ‘as well,’ do you mean also? Or do you mean as well as I?” said Elise. Lorena was no longer giggling. Mr. McQueen looked as if he had fallen into a hole in a pasture.
“Why are you dressed like a scarecrow?” Elise asked him.
“Why, I’ve been hired on as one.”
“You can stand still for that long? Even if I weren’t crippled, I could never.”
“Please stop using that word,” said Lorena.
“It’s a fortunate thing for those who suffer a similar fate that I have made a significant medical discovery. It is quite possible to walk with only one toe on your foot.”
Lorena looked embarrassed for herself, not so much for her sister. Don’t be embarrassed, Lorena. It’s not your fault. And no one else knows what happened. Only the three of us in this room know the truth.
“Only the three of us in this room know the truth,” said Elise.
“About what?”
Prairie Fever Page 9
