Elise put the letters back in the sock drawer. So little guilt did she feel for reading them that she worried about herself. This was new and a curiosity: feeling bad about not feeling bad.
In her head, leading the stubborn Buck home that evening, Elise imagined the letter she might write to him, were she Lorena. At night, lying awake in the attic, moonlight striping the empty cot of her mushy-letter-writing sister, she sat up beneath a lamp turned low and wrote out a draft.
Dearest Gus—
“Wherefore art thou” does not mean “where are you,” sweet man. It means “what are you doing right now, pray tell, I would dearly like to know.” I feel like I might die if you don’t tell me what you are doing right this minute. I will be found in the morning, stiff as a frozen board, having died from lack of the thing I need to know, which is what you are doing.
I like to imagine you going about your day, having arrived early to school on The Beatitudes, that lumbering sweet-natured beast who behaved so bravely in the storm that tragically disfigured my little sister on that fateful day in our history. The day that sealed our fate.
Perhaps you are stoking the stove so that the schoolhouse is warm for those children arriving pinned in blankets from far out in the country, except there aren’t any, not after Elise and me. You will never encounter two girls or even one girl or, for heaven’s sake, a boy who knows to construct a sky of blanket above them, their own universe with its rules and systems and strange characters (e.g., Big Idea and, of course, Edith Gotswegon). Never will you encounter another horse like Sandy, who knows the way to every destination in all the far corners of the earth and who even knew the way in that storm, actually. The only reason he strayed from the road was owing to human error. Were it up to him, had his advice been heeded, nothing bad would have ever happened and I would have made it to Hobart in one piece instead of missing several key pieces. Did I tell you I heard from Sandy? I had a lovely letter from him. He has joined a circus. He grew tired of cliff diving, as one does. He penned his expansive and news-packed missive in the town of Mexia, Texas. His rider in the circus is a Mexican who goes by Julio but whose real name is Juan. He is a dwarf. He rides Sandy while standing. Under the supposed guidance of Julio, Sandy gallops around a circle while Julio does back flips through rings of fire held by locals plucked from the audience. Sandy let Juan believe he had trained him for this venture because that it is his way, but of course Sandy was born knowing how to please a crowd, his timing being impeccable.
In his missive he said an interesting thing. I have now traveled widely, he wrote. I have lived by the sea and spent time in Mexico City with its overcrowded thoroughfares and drunken men hanging off streetcars in the gloaming. I have been to Houston, a buggy and malarial blight built entirely on swampland, filled with men made ruthless by the promise of fortune and horses equally ruthless in their dream of finer tack and fresh and bountiful hay. I have crossed mountains in the territory they call New Mexico and on stony hillsides I have come across the ruins of ancient peoples. But it is the prairie of which I dream. At night I close my eyes and hear the singing grass. I miss the grasshoppers hopping at the last millisecond out of my way. I even miss the wind. I know it to be relentless and punishing, but in memory it appears as movement, a reminder of the grand contradiction of the prairie. The plains stretch away to the sky and you sense it as it came into being, unchanged and therefore fixed, but in fact the wind keeps it from stasis. Sooner or later every grain of dirt is picked up and set down elsewhere. Horses succumb to its movement, finding new pastures to feast on, and in time people do also, but often not traveling far. Sometimes they erect new houses within sight of the old home place.
It was time for me to move on, wrote Sandy in his missive postmarked Mexia, Texas. But I know my way home.
Back to you, Gus. I see you going about the business of preparing for the school day. From a book held open, you copy pithy aphorisms on the board for the children to learn. You sit at your desk and go over your lesson plans. The children begin to trickle in. You hear them before you see them, for they are raucous in the schoolyard, knowing their day will be spent in silence. You are a gifted teacher, Gus. You know how to ask the question, even if you don’t always, my dear, know the right questions to ask. At least you know enough not to presume to know the answer, for who but Edith Gotswegon expects that from you, or even cares about it?
Oh, Gus, I miss you so. But I must now share a vision I had that involves, well, sharing. The other night I was coming home from a study session, and my route back to the dorm took me right past the music building. The windows of the basement practice rooms were open and from each came the sounds of musicians honing their skills. (Some, I should add, were not yet in possession of what I would call skills, but still, they were, as my father would say, “hard at it.”) I lingered awhile beneath a tree—a weeping willow, in fact, which is as you know my favorite tree—and listened, and it was then that I had my idea. You love music. You told me once you wanted to learn to play an instrument. Why not get Elise to teach you the piano? Elise is, as we know, an impetuous girl, but she is a gifted musician and an assiduous teacher. I even thought it might prove both convenient and mutually beneficial—and pardon me for being presumptuous—if Elise moved her piano into your spare room. She could give lessons to others there, which would be a good thing for her, as I highly doubt anyone would want to travel from town out to the farm for instruction. You might gussy (pun intended!) up the place, for it is a bit bleak in there. Perhaps you might hang the Turner reproduction on one wall, as it gives off a solemn but transcendent aura, much like the music of Chopin.
Of course this is for you and Elise to decide, but perhaps you could work out some remuneration that involves the cost of lessons for you? Oh, tell me, Gus, what do you think of my idea? Write to me this minute. I want to hear your thoughts. If only I were there to discuss this with you in person. But for now this flimsy paper will have to suffice.
With all my deepest love,
Lorena
Reading over her letter the next morning, Elise realized how bad she was at pretending to be anyone other than who she was. The first half of the letter, with its lengthy update on Sandy, was pure her. Why would Sandy ever contact Lorena? He loved her deeply and protected her equally from the elements, but Lorena, who claimed always to be the “rider” to Elise’s “passenger,” did not share with Sandy the special bond. Lorena often described Sandy as “a very fine horse.” Once she even said to Elise, “Sandy is a horse.” This showed just how much she knew. All she did not know about Sandy, about the world beyond the world in which Sandy and Elise moved, would never be taught to her at college in Stillwater.
Only toward the late middle of the letter did Elise remember to speak from her sister’s voice. She proved a feeble parrot. Lorena’s voice was both proper and wry. Certainly she was capable of a sharpness of tone. Plus the letters found in Gus’s sock drawer were all of a type. If Elise had to classify them, she would put them in the mushy category. Lorena had no example of Elise speaking to Gus of matters that were serious.
Then she understood the reason she’d written it: someone had to tell Lorena what was going on. It would not do for her to find out that Elise had taken up partial residence in Mr. McQueen’s house. It would certainly not do for Lorena to find out from someone else that Elise was, in effect, running a business out of Mr. McQueen’s house. Therefore the solution was to rewrite the letter but address it to Lorena. She must broach the idea (pretending, of course, that the enterprise of which she spoke was not already well established, that contracts had not been drawn up, that she was adding students, etc.) and do so with such persuasive skill that Lorena, in the manner of their father, with whom she had more in common that she cared to admit, would think the idea hers alone.
It had not occurred to her to think about Lorena in her dealings with Mr. McQueen. But she knew that Lorena would not be exactly happy to hear that she was doing what she was doing. Yet why should s
he concern herself with what her sister would think, since Mr. McQueen never mentioned it? Elise spent many hours debating whose responsibility it was to inform Lorena of the arrangement. On the one hand, she had known Lorena longest. On the other hand, she had read enough novels to know that when one falls in love with the stranger-come-to-town, one always forsakes family.
In Lorena’s case, there was not much to forsake. She hated their father and she treated their mother as if she were a child, except when her mother was presenting her with the ceremonial college steamer trunk, which she accepted with alacrity.
Sandy was away, traveling.
That left only Elise to leave behind. They were but a single bag of giggly bones beneath the blanket that was the sky. Was that not forever? Had the two of them taken off for Hobart together that day—had Lorena not remained in the classroom—Elise would walk, and even run, like a normal person.
Elise understood then: that was the moment when she had been forsaken. Lorena had chosen Gus over her sister, with whom she had shared a skin and a sky.
6
GUS MCQUEEN
Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, Fall 1917
With both Lorena and Elise gone, Gus found even less pleasure in teaching. He even felt the loss of Edith Gotswegon, who could be counted upon for an antagonistic friction that kept everyone half-awake.
Gus put his energy into teaching the Bulgarians to properly employ articles, but they came to school only for the first week and then disappeared. He did not see them again until they brought Elise’s piano to his house a few weeks later. Their father drove the wagon while Elise played his favorite patriotic songs.
Climbing down off the wagon, watching the Bulgarians unload her piano, Elise looked both embarrassed and enthused. Gus supposed she was enthusiastic about setting up her piano studio in his spare room. He had little furniture, but the house was solidly built (crucial in the windy spring and frigid winter) and the fireplace drew so well he barely needed kindling. There was indoor plumbing, a luxury he had never experienced. Two rectangular bedrooms with closets opened onto a hallway that led to the tiled bathroom. A back porch had been converted into a kitchen (a summer kitchen stood still in the backyard, as well as a good-size barn for The Beatitudes), and the floor sloped, but the cookstove was new. Gus was twenty years old and he had a house and a sweetheart. His fireplace drew. He had a job. He needed another now that he had to pay for his lodging and was no longer working for Mr. Stewart, who had let him go after the cotton harvest.
After school one day Gus went down to the Kiowa County News and asked if they needed a part-time reporter. He had met the editor, a Mr. Jeremiah Starling, and made it clear, lest it get back to C. H. Griffith, that he would be keeping his teaching post but could work nights and on the weekends when he did not travel to Stillwater.
Mr. Starling said there was no such thing as a part-time reporter, nor was it customary when seeking employment to reserve the right to take weekends off to visit your sweetheart up at the university. However, he said, he could use someone to proof the columns written by community correspondents.
“Mrs. Eleanor Singleton, who covers Gotebo, cannot spell Gotebo.”
“That’s a tricky one,” Gus said to appear agreeable.
“No, it’s not. It is spelled exactly like it sounds. I have to sit down with her column and translate every word into standard English. Not only her, but almost all the others. There is one man, a lawyer from out at Retrop, who might know a sentence if it crawled into bed with him, but the others are hopeless. It is time-consuming and it takes me away from my principle task, which is to afflict the comfortable.”
“When do I start?”
“I can’t pay much. People around here believe the paper ought to be free. They think it is a public service. Advertisers are slow to pay their bills, and folks who consider themselves upstanding will steal their neighbor’s paper without the slightest bit of Christian remorse.”
“I am a huge fan of your newspaper, Mr. Starling,” said Gus. He thought but did not say that it did a lousy job of keeping the wind out of the teacherage and that it had indirectly caused a girl to nearly die of frostbite, both good things to leave out of the interview, but he had been introduced to the paper by Elise quoting from it, and he was—he remained—a devoted reader.
“The job is yours if you will answer one question for me.”
Gus figured the question would involve grammar. His grasp of grammar was mostly instinctive, though thanks to Dr. Hall, he could diagram a sentence.
“Fire away,” said Gus, preparing to be shot down.
“You were mentioned in an article I wrote about the Stewart girl who got lost in the blizzard.”
“Yes?”
“You declined to be interviewed. Why?”
This was his question? Gus was flustered by it.
“I declined at the request of the mother, who did not feel the publicity would be good for the girl,” he said. This was not exactly a lie, since should Mrs. Stewart have been capable of expressing her desires, surely she would have felt this way.
“Now that the girl has recuperated and has been given a piano by the Women of the Church as reported in the paper, and has, I hear, recently taken over Miss Mary Margaret Burke Kerr Robertson’s piano practice, I wonder if you might answer the question I would have asked had you consented to the interview.”
Gus would not betray either sister for a job correcting the grammar of the writer of News from the Gotebo Community. But he realized that he did not have to betray anyone. He could say, honestly, I don’t know. He knew what Lorena had told him, and she was not a liar, but when he visited Elise in the hospital the day she was discharged, and she had talked about hearing one’s true cry, he realized that her trip was only ostensibly about research. He had said as much to her. She had asked him to elaborate. Then the lovely nurse had come, saving him as he and Lorena had saved Elise, and also themselves.
Gus said, “I don’t know why she left school that day or where she was going.”
Mr. Starling looked at him in a manner that reminded Gus of the expression of Abraham Lincoln in the office of C. H. Griffith, but when he walked out the door, he was employed by the Kiowa County News. When Elise had come to the schoolhouse, asking if she could teach piano lessons from his spare room, Gus had said yes without thinking about it. He liked the idea of his house filled with students of Beethoven and Bach. He thought to inform C. H. Griffith, in case the neighbors gossiped about the goings-on at the schoolteacher’s house, but it was easy to talk himself out of a trip to C. H. Griffith’s office.
He meant to tell Lorena in each letter he wrote, but for some reason he did not. He was planning on it. If he were a list maker, telling Lorena that Elise was operating a business out of his spare bedroom would top his things to do.
But it was easy enough to believe that Lorena would be thrilled. She was away in Stillwater and he was alone here, and it would not hurt for him to have someone to talk to. Who else but Elise? The scale-practicing Elise predicted would drive him crazy was beautiful to him. Do re mi fa so la ti do, climbing up and down the keyboard, in and out of tune, wrong notes and right ones, he could hear it from the street walking up the sidewalk, and it was as lovely as birdsong.
If Elise were with a pupil when Gus got home, he would set up at the kitchen table and work on his proofreading, which Mr. Starling allowed him to take home because he paid by the page. Mr. Starling was prone to sneaking in, between the community reports, reminders to readers to settle their bills:
Is there an X in front of your name on this paper? Look and see, and if there is, it means your subscription has expired and you are gently reminded that the editor needs the money as much as you do.
Gus wondered why Mr. Starling, instead of gently reminding his readers in arrears, did not simply stop delivery. He decided Mr. Starling took great delight in being slighted. His gentle reminders gave him obvious pleasure. Gus shared them with Elise, who loved them, especially the one
about the farmer and his wife, which he read to her several times the day it appeared in the paper.
TOLD IN A DREAM
A FARMER HAD a dream. He dreamed that he had raised a thousand bushels of wheat and he was happy over the fact. Then he dreamed that he had sold his wheat for a dollar a bushel and his happiness was great. But now he dreamed that he had sold it to a thousand different people, a bushel to each person, and that nobody had paid him and he was sad. When he awoke it was broad daylight and leaping out of bed he exclaimed to his wife, “Rebecca, I have had a solemn warning and I know the meaning of it. I am going right off to town and pay the editor the dollar I owe him for the paper.
“He is lucky, that farmer,” said Elise. “I have had many solemn warnings and I haven’t known the meaning of any of them.”
“What I would like to know is Rebecca’s reply to the farmer,” said Gus.
“You be the farmer and I will be Rebecca,” she said. She studied him, still in his school clothes. “Go and tie your handkerchief around your neck at the very least. You look too much like a schoolmaster to play the part convincingly.”
Gus got up and went into his bedroom. He rooted around in his sock drawer, searching for his bandanna. Lorena’s letters were hidden there or, rather, stored there—he had no reason to hide them, at least until that moment, when he realized that they were on the opposite side of the drawer from they’d been that morning. (Gus was strongly right-sided and would never have hidden the letters on the left side of the drawer.) He doubted Elise allowed her students to wander about his house, but he knew that her lessons sometimes went over, as he had come home to find pupils sitting in his parlor, impatiently waiting their turn. It could have been one of them. He remembered going through his father’s drawers and finding, beneath his socks, a photograph of his mother and a purple felt box containing a wedding band with a tiny diamond. His mother’s, obviously. There was also a photograph of his father and Aunt Mattie atop a donkey, the river in the background. When his father left to find work in Charlotte, he took most of his socks but not the wedding ring or the photographs. Gus had brought them along with him to Lone Wolf. The only reason they were not hidden in his sock drawer (they were just below, in his underwear drawer) was because he took great pains not to be like his father.
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