Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  “Which would be the ones you mentioned.”

  “They’ve worked for thousands. Millions, I daresay.” Mr. Griffith leaned forward. His chair creaked under his weight. “I am only trying to say that the older one seems a much better match. She is exemplary, both mentally and physically, and she can be counted upon to stay the course.”

  His metaphors had moved from the barnyard to the high seas. It appeared he wanted to marry Lorena himself. He seemed not to know that Gus and Elise were already married, or perhaps he expected Gus to divorce his wife of four weeks and three days and marry her sister as per his suggestion. Gus, his duty discharged, left without shaking the man’s hand, and wished never to lay eyes on him again.

  But a month later Mr. C. H. Griffith came to his house. They were leaving for Texas the next day, and Gus was loading up the wagon, with the help of some schoolboys. Elise, thank goodness, was out.

  Gus received him on the porch. “I’d ask you in, but as you can see—”

  “Never mind that, this won’t take long. I’ve come to tell you that I was wrong.”

  Gus was fairly stunned. He’d almost believe a postcard from his father turning up sooner than C. H. Griffith come to his house to admit wrongdoing.

  “I’ve had a note from your Miss Stewart. Or, rather, the Miss Stewart you threw over. It seems I misjudged her character. She writes to say that she has chosen not to return to college.”

  Gus nodded.

  “You realize what that means.”

  “I’m to pay back the money she borrowed.”

  “You are to pay back the money you borrowed.”

  “I’m good for it,” said Gus.

  “Where are you moving to, if I might ask.”

  “Texas.”

  “Good God,” said C. H. Griffith. “That means I’ll never see a dime. Every scoundrel who crosses that line becomes twice the scoundrel. The boundary between Oklahoma and Texas is not only geographical.”

  Gus said (again, but softer, if only to annoy the man) that he was good for it, though he had no idea how he was going to come up with it, since he was due only one month’s pay and that was already spent on a wagon and team for their move to Texas.

  “I will say this, speaking about character,” Mr. Griffith was saying. “You’ve heard the phrase ‘the apple does not fall far from the tree’?”

  “Why, no,” said Gus. “Did you come up with it yourself?”

  “I did not. It’s a common saying, out here at least. Perhaps it has not yet reached the South.”

  “We’re simple people, it’s true. We’re more apt to put it literally: ‘Like father, like son,’ is how we say it. But you are speaking of a father and his daughters?”

  “I am speaking also of the mother. I don’t know the woman, but from what I’ve heard—”

  “I’d like you to leave,” Gus said. Plenty of people spoke ill of Harold Stewart, and it wasn’t as if what Mr. Griffith were saying about him was untrue, but Gus could not allow him to say a word against Elise’s mother. She had been nothing but sweet to him in her intermittently present way.

  “I have written already to Dr. Hall.”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “I feel as though he’ll pay a visit to your aunt.”

  “I feel as though he likely will. And here’s what is likely to happen if he repeats your vile and ignorant judgment of people you have never met: my aunt will tell him to get off her property. I asked you to get off my property. Need I now tell you?”

  “I want the money in full now.”

  “That is not in the terms of the agreement.”

  “I would say that your leaving the state for that republic of reprobates south as well as west of us is grounds for me to change the terms.”

  “Even I know you can’t just change the terms.”

  “I believe any Lone Wolf lawyer would side with me.” Mr. C. H. Griffith paused. He shifted his gaze to the window of the bungalow. He stepped up to the glass and peered in.

  “I assume you are planning on taking that piano.”

  “I don’t understand your question.”

  “It wasn’t a question.”

  “But of course it was. You can’t come up on my porch and tell me you are taking my wife’s piano.”

  “Indeed I can if you owe me five hundred dollars.”

  “That piano was a gift to my wife. It is how she makes her livelihood.”

  “I feel sure they sell pianos somewhere in Texas. Though come to think of it, probably not. You might have to come back to Oklahoma to purchase anything other than a steer or a firearm.”

  “You are certainly one to lecture a man about character.”

  “I am a banker, Mr. McQueen. It is my job to protect my money. I invested in your former fiancée’s future, and she has decided not to have a future—she informs me that she is moving to Wyoming, which is almost as bad as Texas, perhaps worse for a single woman of her age and looks—so therefore I must do everything in my power to insure that I don’t lose money.”

  “I can’t let you take that piano.”

  “What else do you have equal to its value?”

  “You can have all the furniture.”

  Mr. Griffith walked over to the cart. The schoolboys he’d hired were watching from the shade of a front-yard maple. Gus went over and paid them a dollar each and told them to come back that evening. Then he went back to the porch and watched C. H. Griffith study the sideboard, the crude pine table, the pie safe with its bent and rusty tin, the paint-flaky iron bedstead. He rifled through a box of kitchen implements, extracting a rolling pin still caked in flour. He shook his head, disgusted.

  “I will send my man over later this afternoon to pick up the piano.”

  “You should send more than one.”

  “I don’t expect you to help load it.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of helping you load it.”

  “Ought I to send the sheriff?”

  “If you see fit.”

  The sheriff saw fit to send a deputy, along with two Kiowa to load the piano while he kept the peace. Gus was not at peace as he watched from the porch, especially when Elise came home as they were carrying her piano across the yard.

  Gus took her inside and explained about the loan.

  “So my piano is paying for her year of college?”

  “Yes.”

  “You might have told me about the loan.”

  “I saw no need,” said Gus. “Never would I have figured your sister for a dropout.”

  “She is trying to punish me,” said Elise.

  Gus thought to say that it wasn’t Lorena who took her piano away. It shamed him to remember the day the piano arrived at his bungalow, Elise playing Stephen Foster in the back of the Bulgarian’s wagon, her father prancing alongside on Buck, dusty dogs and skinny children in tow.

  “Maybe she did not care for Stillwater,” he said, which shamed him even more, for he ought to be apologizing instead of making excuses for Lorena’s defection. Why would she not go to Wyoming? Likely she wanted to get as far away from him—and Elise—as possible without having to learn a foreign tongue.

  But Elise was smart enough to see through his excuse. “Whether she liked her college is not the point. You signed that loan and you ought to have told me about it.”

  Gus said, “You’re right,” in a way that sounded penitent and final, but it seemed that Elise did not consider his statement either.

  “So she left college after a year because she got a job. Was that why she was going to college in the first place? To live in some drafty teacherage and deal with the Edith Gotswegons of Wyoming?”

  “She wanted to be a teacher,” said Gus. “She didn’t have the money, so I went to C. H. Griffith on her behalf.”

  “On her behalf.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which behalf? The behalf you thought you loved? Or the one you thought it more sensible and respectable to marry?”

  “She deserves to go to coll
ege.”

  “I don’t dispute that. And I find it noble of you to go to the overfed banker on one of her behalves. But it doesn’t seem fair that you two cooked up some financial scheme, and the poor crippled girl to whom the Women of the Church gave a piano is now listening to her piano being loaded carelessly onto a wagon.”

  It was true. From the foyer, they could hear the strings inside the piano, off-key, plaintive, and in obvious protest.

  “You’re right,” said Gus. He wondered if she knew what Lorena had told him—that their mother had some money, a considerable amount of which was used to settle Elise’s medical bills. He remembered Lorena telling him about her brothers dying of prairie fever and Elise not understanding that it was typhoid, and he wondered to what extent the family had, as Lorena put it, “indulged” Elise’s character, or at least parts of it. He did not care to keep secrets from his wife, but he felt sure she was keeping secrets from him. She breathed oxygen. If she were to cut herself on a piece of stationery, she would bleed. She needed food and water. Therefore there were things she did not share with anyone else.

  And there were things between the sisters that predated him, things he would never know about, that he had nothing to do with. Sometimes Gus understood that after leaving Lorena for Elise, he was in some way responsible for everything that ever happened, even events that occurred when he was back in Hibriten. He had become a date, by which all other things in their lives were timed. He remembered Dr. Hall defining a noun as a person, place, or thing. He ought to have also added: a date.

  Gus knew this and many other things that, had he let himself fully feel, he’d have likely sought out a riverbank alongside which he might squander many an abject hour. Sometimes he could not help but think of Lorena, but it wasn’t so fully formed as to be called a thought. More like a quickening in his limbs, a twitch to ward off, lest he allow himself to feel the brunt of his guilt. Lorena and Elise, for he knew he’d yanked off the blanket that once kept them together, knew he’d exposed them to an element worse than icy wind, which was the jealous hurt of the heartsick. But he had found a way to combat feeling wretched. He employed it now, easing shut the front door with his toe, leaning back against the wall, and pulling Elise into him.

  “The bed is in the wagon already,” she said.

  He grabbed her around the waist and flipped her so that she was against the wall. He pulled off his belt. He kicked off his shoes. He lifted her dress.

  “This is how we say goodbye to Lone Wolf,” he said into her ear.

  Elise said with her body that she could not think of a way that suited her better, though Gus could tell that a part of her—not so much the missing parts of her, but the part of her that had got lost in the storm—was not coming with him.

  9

  ELISE STEWART

  April 20, 1918

  Sandy

  c/o Lorena Stewart

  113 Morton Dormitory

  Oklahoma State University

  Stillwater, Okla.

  Dear Sandy,

  Last I heard from you, you were visiting our nation’s capital. I enjoyed hearing of the abundant statuary and of the cherry trees beautiful in their flowering. I have always wanted to visit there even though government is not something about which I am deadly curious.

  I was unaware that it is a low city compared to New York and Chicago. I trust you in such matters, as you have traveled widely yet still prefer the haunting and eerily beautiful symphony of the prairie.

  I first heard the grass sing while riding atop you, Sandy. I first saw the grasshoppers spring out of the way of your hooves and knew that the earth was teeming with life, that dirt was alive, and the prairie lived even in winter when buried beneath snow. But it was spring when we rode across the prairie to the swish of its singing grasses. Were we off to deliver mail to the prairie dogs? Perhaps we were stopping in on the Bulgarians, in their sod house filled with hay.

  But why am I telling you what you already know? Because I am mailing this letter to you in care of an unstated party. Oh I am, am I?

  You know everything that happens in my life, but writing to you makes it newly true. There is old true (truth you were born with, color-of-your-eyes truth) and there is new true. There is also the unstated party who might not want to hear news from me, but how could she ever refuse word from you, Sandy?

  Some random items from the Kiowa County News:

  “J. M. Williams is having a front porch added to his house on Slocum Avenue.”

  “Mr. Gus McQueen’s wedding reception will be held next Saturday week at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Stewart of Gotebo Road, Lone Wolf. All who read this notice are invited to attend.” (This is not from the Kiowa County News; it is a “special” to this letter.) Perhaps, Sandy, you could arrange to pick up the unstated party at the train station? While I can understand why she might not care to attend, it is my sincerest hope that she be able to distinguish between old and new true and call upon that born-with truth that was and will forever be a blanket protecting us both from the elements, a universe of two, plus you, Sandy.

  That is my hope and it is sincere.

  Love,

  Elise

  May 1, 1918

  Sandy

  c/o Lorena Stewart

  113 Morton Dormitory

  Oklahoma State University

  Stillwater, Okla.

  My dearest Sandy—

  You and I know that words are wind. The sky uses wind to say “This is what I want,” expressing its innermost desires, while people use words to order a pound of butter or state their “ideas” while standing about in the mouths of barns.

  Wind leaves you chapped, but not for long, unless accompanied by snow, ice, and single-digit or below-zero temperatures. Wind can maim. Single-digit or below-zero wind can subtract digits, resulting in floppy gloves and socks three-quarters filled.

  Can words maim?

  From yesterday’s Kiowa County News: “M. E. Wade was badly burned last night caused by an explosion of the gasoline lamp at his home. His face was badly burned but is said not to be serious.”

  Who says it is not serious, Sandy? Who gets to say what is and is not serious?

  Words written are said to mean more than words spoken. That is why I am writing to you, Sandy. That is why I persist and will continue to persist in writing to the unstated audience, whether she writes back or not. She might like to know some things. She might like to know that we are moving to Texas. I will bring along my piano and continue to teach young and old alike how to bend their fingers at the knuckle. The instinct of most is to slap at the keyboard as if they are playing patty-cake. Sometimes instincts are to be ignored. I speak here no longer of proper keyboard technique. Yet sometimes instincts must be honored if you are to be a living thing like the prairie, even in the part of the winter referred to erroneously as “dead.”

  Love,

  Elise

  July 16, 1918

  Sandy

  c/o Lorena Stewart

  c/o Edna O’Connelly

  326 Coffeen Ave.

  Sheridan, Wyo.

  Dearest, loveliest Sandy—

  When I was little, I had multiple names for everyone I knew. One of my names for you, Sandy, was Everybody’s Sunshine Crocodile. I called my mother Mother of Pearl, even though she did not have a child named Pearl. (Mother of Pearl, as you are well aware, is not fake pearl; it is my mother’s nickname.)

  I had no other name for myself. I would rather not have a name at all. Then no one will come to the edge of the prairie and say a word that means supper is ready. No one will yell out the window into the yard some word that means now.

  When I was upset with my sister (which was rare, Sandy) I called her Edith Gotswegon. I might have called her other names, but they were childish and slipped from my tongue in the heat of anger, and why can we not forget all such times, as if we were to tally right now, it would not be the bad times that would emerge in the victory column.

  From ou
tside Hobart, some sad but also somewhat exciting news to share:

  BARN BURNED

  A BARN CONTAINING 300 bushels of corn belonging to C. W. Erwin was burned Tuesday morning just before day. It was the work of an incendiary, the tracks of the horse he rode being found near the house. When this was learned, Johnson and Duckett of Altus were phoned to come over with their bloodhounds. They hurried and as soon as hitting the ground the dogs took up the trail and chased it right to the home of a bad character and enemy to C. W. Erwin, about two miles away. They think they have the fugitive located; an arrest will probably be made today.

  In other news not recorded in the Kiowa County News, we left Lone Wolf for Fort Davis two weeks ago, for good. Father and Mother left before us, Father having sold the farm for what he deemed peanuts but what Mother told me was more than a fair price considering its state. They are already settled in tiny Shafter, in southwest Texas near the border, where Father has taken up the mining of silver. We stayed behind while Gus finished out the school year and I packed up the bungalow. It was well appointed, as you know, Sandy, and the fireplace drew like a dream. I will miss it and many things in Lone Wolf, most of all the prairie, of course, and its glorious symphony I’d not have heard had it not been for you. Also I will miss my piano, which was taken from me to settle some complicated financial arrangement with C. H. Griffith. It involved a loan Gus McQueen cosigned for, which was defected upon, if that is the proper terminology—I confess, Sandy, I did not understand the specifics and I especially did not understand why my piano was taken. One day I arrived home from visiting Mother to find it being loaded in a wagon by two Kiowa. A deputy sheriff oversaw the piano loading from the back of his horse while cradling his shotgun. They sent along an armed man as if we were no more than barn-burning incendiaries, set upon by bloodhounds. I miss my piano. What of the songs inside me? How are they to find their way out into the world now?

  By the way, Sandy, and I include this only because I know you were always fond of Damyan: he did not attend the wedding reception. He was not traveling, like you, Sandy. He was holed up in the old sod house with the hay and potatoes and, according to his brothers, a bottle of plum wine. He had long wanted to Get Steady with me, as he called it. His brothers came to the reception and said I hurt his heart. They said I took the color from his skin. As they said all this, they were stuffing their mouths with cakes. Crumbs were falling from their mouths. I did not feel bad because the person I most wanted to be there was not there, and besides, people are not supposed to eat with their mouths full and it is difficult to tell the difference between a word and a tiny crumb of cake.