“Are you scared to leave home?”
“Scared?” she said. She looked at Elise in a way that reminded her of times long past, when blanket was sky and nothing could hurt them because they were just a bag of old giggly bones.
“I am ready to get on with my life,” she said finally.
Which Elise interpreted to mean: I am and I am not terrified.
Elise lay on the cot watching her sister refold all her clothes. She thought about getting on with her own life. She seemed, often, to be lost still in a storm. How was she to get to school without Sandy? In good weather she could walk, but it would take much longer than usual, for she could not run anymore, or skip, or even walk very fast. Her father’s horse was named Buck, because, for heaven’s sake, he once bucked someone. Would you name a horse Kick if he kicked someone? Buck could not find his way out of the barnyard. What about when winter came to Lone Wolf? How would she get to school?
Ancient Mrs. Robertson had finally retired. The future musical prodigies of Lone Wolf would require immediate instruction, as well as those as tone-deaf as Lorena. Therefore she might just stop all this school business. Hardly anyone in Lone Wolf continued past the eighth grade anyway. The Bulgarians were on a fourth-grade level (except for Damyan, who was smarter but moonier, so he was a year behind) and only came to school in the winter to escape being put to work in the cold by their father who came from the mountains of Bulgaria bordering Romania and told his sons of winters so cold blood froze in the veins of sheep.
Elise thought it possible to teach piano and travel wildly in one’s mind. If Joseph Womack could preach in his sleep, she could teach seven-year-olds to play “Auld Lang Syne” while cliff diving with Sandy in Mexico.
She had a piano, praise be the Women of the Church. It would make them feel vindicated if she put it to constant use. Maybe the Kiowa County News would do a feature on the nine-fingered piano teacher of Lone Wolf and the Women of the Church would be given full credit for saving her from a life of idling by the window, staring out at the prairie, dressed in a style popular when she’d suffered her tragic accident. She could throw in a few hymns to keep them happy. She had some feeling in her heart for “Amazing Grace.” Also “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today,” though she was confused by the verb tense. Most of Mrs. Robertson’s pupils had ended up playing in some country church or the other, so it stood to reason that she should include hymns.
The question was, Would parents want to haul their children so far out into the country for lessons? Mrs. Robertson lived two blocks from the schoolhouse. Most of her pupils took lessons after school, when they were in town already. Also, there was the problem of her father and his crew of idea men loitering around the barn. Though there was nothing unsavory about them (with the possible exception of Big Idea, who was rumored to have taken to drink), it did not look proper, a group of grown men standing around idle of a perfectly clement afternoon.
Mr. McQueen had quit the teacherage and rented a house on Fourth Street. She had not been in it, but she had seen it from the outside and it appeared commodious for one person. Maybe he would let her one of the rooms—surely there was a parlor—in which to teach piano. She thought to ask Lorena, but Lorena had much preparation to do in order to relocate to the town of Stillwater. She might as well run it by Mr. McQueen first, rather than distracting Lorena just before her departure from Lone Wolf.
In early September, Mr. McQueen came to fetch Lorena to take her to meet her train. He had borrowed C. H. Griffith’s buggy, for which The Beatitudes now showed some begrudging familiarity. Mr. McQueen hoisted the steamer trunk into the back with new muscles gained by working as a field hand rippling beneath his sweat-darkened shirt. Her father hitched Buck to their saggy wagon and they formed a slow caravan to the station. Elise was invited to ride with Mr. McQueen by Mr. McQueen, but Lorena’s eyebrows suggested that she politely decline.
Here came the train, steamy and whistling. Lorena hugged her father awkwardly. Her mother shed tears all over the shawl Lorena had “tossed” over her shoulders to distinguish herself on the trip and looked woefully at the steamer trunk she herself had taken so many years ago to college as it was loaded onto the train. Later, when they were back home and the house felt as if half the furniture had been removed in their brief absence (not that her sister was akin to a love seat or pie safe, just that her absence was present in every corner of every room in the house), Elise would accuse her mother of wanting to curl up in that steamer trunk and run away to Stillwater, leaving Elise, her last child, alone.
“Oh, Elise,” her mother would say, which is what she so often said.
Then it was time for Elise to say goodbye to her sister. All week she had been thinking of what to whisper in her ear to bring back all the times they had slumped together beneath the blanket, singing songs the words of which were lost in the sideways snow and coyote wind of the prairie. And here was Lorena’s ear and Elise’s mouth poised to whisper, but all the words got sucked out of her by some unfamiliar and terrifying mix of desire, envy, and shame.
“Stillwater runs deep,” she said lamely as Lorena pulled away and fell into a surprisingly affectionate embrace with Mr. McQueen, now just Gus.
For days, Elise wondered why she had said such an impudent thing, not to mention a wasted one, for Mr. McQueen was helping Lorena up the steps of the train car, as if she were the crippled one, and Elise’s words were swallowed by the updraft of the steam from the idling train, its deafening hiss.
They stood frozen in the train’s wake. Elise smelled the creosote of the ties on the tracks. Thereafter she could smell a telephone pole and recall all the times words failed her, chief among them the day Lorena left home for Stillwater.
All the way home, Elise’s mother’s nose ran, as was its custom when she cried. It made Elise aware of her own nose, the missing tip of it, and reflexively she wiped it with the back of her hand.
Elise did not cry until she accused her mother of wanting to curl up in the steamer trunk and her mother said “Oh, Elise.” The house fell quiet and Elise moved through the melancholy rooms, furious at the shafts of sunlight painting portions of things—a sideboard, Lorena’s bed—for their quivering violent beauty.
But Elise preferred home to school, which was soon to start.
“I’m not going back,” Elise told Damyan. She met him one hot afternoon in the abandoned sod house, even though she was done with him. But the abandoned sod house was the only cool spot around save the river, and its darkness was mysterious and appealing and maybe she wasn’t done with him after all. He was the only one around she could talk to besides Mr. McQueen, and he didn’t count.
“What will you work?”
“Do you mean where will I work? Or what will I do?”
Damyan nodded rather than risk the wrong words.
She told him of her plan to take over for Mrs. Robertson. She said she may well need him and his brawny brothers to come pick up the piano and haul it into town to Mr. McQueen’s house.
“You have inquired him?”
“No,” she said. “I’m going to town tomorrow to inquire him.” Then she added, because it seemed somehow necessary, “I have some errands to run.”
Damyan asked her if she wanted to get steady. She said that was all she wanted in life and all that she had ever wanted, but didn’t he mean “go steady?” And if he did, which surely he did, it was sweet of him to ask, but she needed time to think it over.
“Why?” said Damyan. She was shocked by his directness. It was not characteristic.
“Because I am about to embark on a career, which might prove to be all-consuming.” As if pupils would be lined up around the block waiting to pay money to mangle Mozart.
She left Damyan in the shadowy sod house, where he said he planned to hide out from his father and sleep through the brutal noon heat. She was tempted to stay with him and nap, but that would mean Getting Steady with him. She knew one thing and one thing only about boys and that was that you can be
terribly mean to them, but if you so much as let them touch the inside of your wrist, they presumed you were theirs forever, future mother of their children, and a possession over which they would fight to their death, not unlike their sidearm or horse.
A few days later at the breakfast table, she asked to take Buck into town. She needed school supplies, she said. Her father agreed with reluctance, as if he were going to do anything but talk to Buck if none of his buddies came round to discuss the war in Europe or Woodrow Wilson or whether the government would outlaw liquor or the brilliant inventions they had submitted for patents that would change the world and make them rich. Her father was a talker and Buck appeared to be deaf—Sandy had told her so, at least—so they made a good pair.
Mounting a horse was difficult when you were lame. In this way Buck proved himself worthy, for stillness was required of him, and in stillness Buck excelled.
She went first to the schoolhouse. She was glad, because for some unknown reason she did not feel right going to his house and ringing his doorbell. He was on his hands and knees, scrubbing the wide buckled floorboards with a brush and a bucket of soapy water.
“I have just swept up enough dirt to equal the lungs of forty Oklahomans,” he said.
“Actually, I am Kansan by birth.”
“Is that terribly different?”
“Is there a terrible difference between South Carolina and North?”
“Terrible does no justice to the gap. As snowy heaven is to fiery hell.”
Elise smiled, too embarrassed to ask him again which one he came from. Whichever one it was, she gleaned it was heavenly to him, which seemed at odds with the little he said about it, the dead sheep shorn by the river rock notwithstanding.
“What brings you to town?”
“I have a business proposition to discuss with you.”
“Then I should get up off my knees. You strike me as the hard-bargain type. If there is haggling involved, I will not want to be kneeling at your feet.”
Mr. McQueen led her outside. They sat on the schoolhouse steps. He wiped sweat from his brow with a handkerchief he had likely tied around his mouth earlier in the manner of a bank robber. She wished they had sat at the desks or that he had invited her into the teacherage, for across the schoolyard was the outhouse where she was once thought to be waiting out the worst of the storm, thus explaining her absence, and just beyond it was the stable, where Sandy had spent his last hours before he had to leave her for Mexico. She wished she had suggested a walk, for everything about the schoolhouse reminded her of what she had come to think of as her great mistake. All the same, she realized that she could not return to school even if she did not take over Mrs. Robertson’s practice. She was as done with school as she was with the Bulgarians, except perhaps Damyan, whose offer to Get Steady was still on the table.
They talked of a letter he had gotten from Lorena describing her dorm room and her roommate from Oklahoma City and the food in the cafeteria (which she realized, as he described it, was nearly identical to the one she sent home, which both reassured her and made her a little sad), and then Mr. McQueen said, “We might as well start with what it’s going to cost me, this business proposition of yours.”
“Only time,” she said, and she explained her notion, careful not to label it an idea. The cost, for him, would be that for a few hours in the afternoons and most Saturday mornings (barring holidays or parades or other celebrations, which were common in Lone Wolf, as Lone Wolf loved a parade) he would have to tolerate the sound of children learning to play the piano. This meant mostly scales. To get the worst out of the way, she made it fairly clear that scales, played by those who have no timing and no feel for the space between notes, which is how Mrs. Robertson told her Debussy defined music, are nearly impossible to get out of your head. What she stopped short of saying is that they could quite possibly drive you mad. Lorena was particularly sensitive to Elise practicing her scales. “Enough with the doodling, please play a real and actual tune,” she would shout from two or three rooms away.
“Do you mean like ‘do re mi fa so la ti do’?”
“The solfa, it’s called. You have musical training?”
“No, but I love music. Perhaps you could teach me to play a little.”
This was unexpected. She had figured on a percentage of her profits, but perhaps her profits could be larger.
“In exchange for my tutoring you. Because you’re not coming back to school this year, are you?”
She had thought this might be the hardest part of all: telling him she was done with school. But he seemed to intuit it from the way she looked at the outhouse and the stable that last held Sandy. Maybe he was remembering those awful boys down at the river with their filthy minds and gills instead of lungs, and he sensed her reluctance to return, given that she had only five toes and a missing finger, and there was her nose, which was most visible. People’s eyes went to it.
Then there was the Befuddling Mystery, as it was referred to in the Kiowa County News. Her mother had never asked where she was going, so happy she was to have her back, but her classmates would never let it go. And it wasn’t as if she could tell them the truth and be done with it, especially since Mr. McQueen, during his visit to the hospital just before they let her out, had made her question the truth, as he was wont to do.
“No,” she said. “I can’t come back.”
“And your parents?”
You know my father, she wanted to say, and she might have were it not that Lorena, who even though she was away in Stillwater, was Getting Steady with Mr. McQueen. He was too polite to say anything critical of either of her parents.
“I wanted to talk to you first,” she said. “See if you were amenable.”
Mr. McQueen said that he had a spare bedroom.
“And I do mean spare. As of this morning there were some coat hangers in the closet. Other than that, it is empty and will remain so, until your pupils fill it with these scales you suggest I might find irritating.”
“If at any time the arrangement becomes a burden . . .” she started.
“I am not so polite as to suffer greatly in order to refrain from telling the truth to someone who demands only the truth.”
Elise thought that this was not the most wonderful thing Mr. McQueen had ever said—that would be still, and she felt always, when he told Edith Gotswegon that sometimes different subjects bleed into each other—but it was the nicest thing that anyone ever said to her. She wondered if it were true.
At supper that night, she told her parents of Mrs. Robertson’s retirement and of the need created in town for a teacher of piano.
“Why, you have that piano the church ladies bought for you,” her father said.
This was her plan: to make her father think it was his idea. If it came from him, he would see it through no matter her mother’s objections.
“I think I could do it,” she said. “Mrs. Robertson was so encouraging. But I believe we’re a bit too far out in the country. It would be a hardship, especially for those in school all day, to come all the way out here. Mrs. Robertson lives smack in the middle of town. We just walked over after school was out. Everyone did.”
“Are you saying you want to move to town?”
“No, Mother. I’m not quite ready to build my mansion, and if and when I do, I am not sure it will be in Lone Wolf.”
Her mother looked relieved.
“What I need is someone in town to let me a room, where I could put the piano and conduct lessons.”
“Why, Gus has moved out of the teacherage,” her father said. “He’s leased a place over on Fourth Street, just behind the church there.”
“What a wonderful idea,” said Elise. “I’ll ask him tomorrow.”
“And what about your schooling?” asked her mother. “Do you plan on going to college?”
“Maybe I could work out a trade with Mr. McQueen.”
“He could tutor you after school,” said her father. It was easy to lead
this horse to water and easier still to make him drink. But her mother saw through everything. In that way, she was terrifying.
“And what would you offer him?”
“Perhaps he would like to learn to play the piano,” she said.
“That’s a mighty big perhaps,” her mother said. “A grown man as busy as Gus.”
Elise realized that soon, very soon, she too could refer to Mr. McQueen by his first name.
“Gus loves music,” said her father. “I have heard him humming on many occasions.”
Her mother looked at Elise in a way that suggested that humming and loving music are not the same thing, nor are humming and wanting to take piano lessons when you are a grown man and already doing what most men thought of as women’s work. Her mother could communicate a lot in a glance, if you knew how to interpret her glances.
“I suppose I could ask him,” said Elise. She made herself sound skeptical if not reluctant.
“I can run into town and work out the details with old Gus,” said her father.
Since it was your idea, Father? Elise thought of asking, but instead she said she needed to go to town to speak to Mrs. Robertson about the practicalities, scheduling and charging.
“In other words, to put it plainly, the nuts and bolts of the thing,” said her father.
“Exactly. I’ll stop by and see Mr. McQueen. Thank you, Father. You’ve been so helpful.”
“Anything for my girl,” he said.
“She’s no longer a girl,” her mother said, blowing into her cup of tea and watching the steam shift in the air of the kitchen, before giving Elise a sideways glance that suggested that after so many years adrift, her mother had willed herself present and accounted for.
Toward the end of September Damyan’s father agreed to let his sons off work for an afternoon to move the piano, and he would provide the wagon but only if Elise would agree to play for him as he drove them into town. The piano was roped to the sides of the wagon, as it shifted and rattled on the corduroyed road. Elise bounced on the bench, the legs of which were tied as well. The Bulgarians lay about in the wagon half-asleep except for Damyan who insisted on sitting alongside her to turn the page at her nod.
Prairie Fever Page 11
