Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  “Why, is that the sky?” he said, looking up at the blanket pinned badly above us.

  I had done a wretched job of pinning. The only worse pin job I have witnessed was by Gus, back when he was Mr. McQueen. But it was okay because it wasn’t needed, really—it was not that cold out to me and it would not have been to you, Lorena, for I hear Wyoming makes Oklahoma seem like Florida.

  It was not needed, but it was wanted. I wanted Leslie to know the feeling of moving through the cold with a sky of blanket. I wanted to sing into his ears and hear him sing back to me, even if the words were lost to wind and blowing snow. I wanted to lift the blanket off when we arrived at our destination and hear his words break into slivers of ice, letters tinkling like chimes as they fall to the ground.

  But it was all wrong. The blanket would not stay put. Almost immediately, the baby began to wail. And that horse, of course, did not know the way.

  Love,

  Elise

  March 28, 1920

  Lorena Stewart

  c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly

  326 Coffeen Ave.

  Sheridan, Wyo.

  Dear Lorena,

  In this letter I shall repeat faithfully everything I saw or heard on our visit. Not that I have not, in previous unanswered correspondence, been a faithful reporter, but this case calls for verbatim reportage of conversations.

  Last weekend we went to see Mother. While there, we saw a bit of Father.

  Mother, who is supposed to have indulged me—by which I think the person who made this claim meant that Mother tolerated, rather than sought to curtail, what others have called my “fanciful nature”—is much taken with Leslie. She was thrilled to hear that I am again with child.

  “Will it be another boy?”

  “I’m only four months along.” Many women claim to know the sex of their child immediately and instinctively, but I am not one of them.

  “I hope so,” she said. Father had taken Gus on a tour of his mining operation. They live in a two-room adobe structure perched on the side of a hill overlooking the mine. In a square mile there must be seven mesquite trees. Most would call them bushes. The soil is not soil but sand and rock, hospitable only to mesquite and ocotillo cacti.

  “Why do you hope so?” I asked Mother.

  “I would have my boys back.”

  By which she meant our brothers, lost to us so long ago.

  To reach Shafter from Fort Davis, you head south through the high grasslands between Fort Davis and the tiny town of Marfa. Eventually the earth begins to drop. The distant mountains are purple in the shadows and a breeze running through the grass can take you right back to Lone Wolf. But as you near Shafter, the road worsens as it twists and switches through deep arroyos. Were you to travel past Shafter and follow the road until it bottoms out, you would hit the Rio Grande and Mexico, which is dusty and smoky year-round with outdoor fires.

  It was then that I asked Mother if she would like to come live with us.

  “With you and Lorena?”

  “With me and Gus.”

  “That would be lovely,” she said. “I could sew you some curtains.”

  It occurred to me that I ought to have checked with my husband first, but just as quickly, it occurred to me that our mother would never leave our father.

  “You might name the next one Elton,” she said. I recalled the day our father won the lottery, affording him 160 acres of land in Lone Wolf. When they called his number, he threw his hat in the air, and our little brother Elton whooped and clapped.

  “You always miss them, don’t you?” I said.

  “Every day.”

  She had given Leslie a biscuit and was much amused by the fervent way he clutched it.

  “I miss Lorena,” she said. “Have you heard from her?”

  “No,” I said. “I have not heard from Lorena.”

  “She likes it in Wyoming. Winter does not slow her down a bit. She wears many layers and has had a new fur coat made to fit. Do you write to her?”

  “I wish you would come home with us today,” I said. “We could start packing your things now.”

  “That would be lovely,” she said, “but I would need curtains.”

  Propped-open shutters covered the crude windows of their adobe shack. The roof was sheets of rusted tin, the floor unsecured planks laid atop the sand. Hourly she opened the front door and swept out the wolf spiders and the scorpions. Often a rattlesnake sunned itself in the yard, coiling and retreating as she swept dirt and venomous bugs its way.

  “Do you miss trees, Mother?”

  “Lorena loved to draw weeping willows. I made her stop.”

  “You made her switch to teepees.”

  She laughed. She was rocking Leslie in a chair by the fireplace. The hearth was six inches deep in ash and the house was filled with flies. A slab of butter covered by a piece of wax paper sat out on the table. Flies swarmed the wax paper. I have lost the war with the dust, she declared when we arrived. She held up her hands in surrender. Her palms were black. I am a casualty, she told us, reaching out for Leslie with her black hands.

  “Elise?” she said. “Should it be a girl, you will name her Lorena May.”

  Leslie was nearly asleep, but something in Mother’s voice made him stir. Something in her voice stirred me.

  Oh, Lorena, I am sorry. I know you will never forgive me but still: I knew the whole time what prairie fever was. I just don’t believe some things have to be real and that makes them not real. Words are wind, and numbers are not arithmetic. I hurt you and I am sorry. I could go on, but what is the point? Do you need me to go over every moment, starting with the day he unpinned us from Sandy, the day he asked Sandy’s name and I saw the look on his face and heard the murmur of his heart when we told him that he and our horse shared a name?

  It has been two years since I have heard from you. I know the number of days and this number is not arithmetic, it is absence, and I’m sorry and I am worried about Mother. She wants to see you so. As do I.

  It is a girl, I know it. She will be called Lorena, but you and I, Lorena, have often discussed our mutual dislike of the middle name May. So just plain Lorena. Lorena May is the name of a cow and our Lorena will be beautiful.

  Once we lived in our world, you and I. A blanket was our sky and we were a giggly bag of bones.

  “Elise?” Mother was saying to me.

  “Yes,” I said. I told her yes, Lorena, I said yes. So when you come, there will be another Lorena, not named after a cow, and as beautiful as you are.

  Please write back.

  Love,

  Your sister,

  Elise

  10

  Lorena Stewart

  326 Coffeen Ave.

  Sheridan, Wyo.

  May 6, 1921

  Edith Gotswegon

  c/o Elise “McQueen”

  Limpia (sp?) Creek

  Fort Davis, Tex.

  Dear Edith Gotswegon:

  I write from Wyoming, as you might have deduced from the postmark, if you are the type to read postmarks. But of course you are not, which is why I am writing to you in the first place.

  I got your address from your mother, who filled me in on all your doings, including the dashing young engineer you met and married. As I read the description of your wedding, I thought of you hiding behind a tree in the quad up at Norman and flicking your long tongue around the engineer, and in this way you have made him yours.

  Actually, I made up an address for you: 3 Winthrop Manor, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. (Does it not sound made up?) I am going to mail this letter, however. Just not to its stated audience. Which is you, Edith Gotswegon. You who is never only Edith, always Edith Gotswegon.

  It’s me, Lorena. Lorena Stewart, from Lone Wolf! Though we have known each other since my father hauled my family to that godforsaken place in a wagon pulled by his mulish horse, Buck, and his big ideas (which took up most of the wagon) and a mess of tools I never once saw him use and my mother’s chest hidden bene
ath quilts, away from the eyes and grubby hands of my younger sister, we were friends, you and I, for nearly half a week during my last year at Lone Wolf School. Yes, that’s correct, I borrowed your hideous scarf that day you read aloud dramatically from the sordid memoirs of Mr. Franklin, of whom your mother did not approve. But your mother, as our teacher at the time pointed out, was not there! What a stellar argument to uphold the standards by which you were raised. I think that I will not emulate it.

  For I am a teacher myself now. I came west from Stillwater, nearly three years ago. It is a curious story, which I will share with you, not because it is any of your concern how I ended up in Wyoming and why I have stayed, but because (unlike some others, Edith, who write cryptic letters to deceased livestock) I am not hiding from anyone or anything.

  As I was finishing up my first year at Stillwater, just before final examinations, a recruiter showed up on campus one afternoon. I happened to pass within yelling distance of him (roughly the length of your tongue) and he enticed me over to the table he’d set up beneath an elm outside the gymnatorium (a ridiculous word, I bet you employ it every chance you get) with a series of penny postcards bearing images of snowcapped peaks. These here are called the Bighorns, he said, and these—he held up another—are the Tetons. The mountains were craggy and imposing. They brought to mind a host of words ending in -ic: prehistoric, volcanic, iconic. I wanted to wake up and look out my window at them. I wanted to walk out onto a porch with my coffee and have them rising above me of a misty early morn. I took the postcard and studied it and paid little attention to the recruiter who was telling me about the quality of the air. He compared it to the water of a mountain stream, which confused me. Did he mean it was frigid year-round? Or clean? I gazed above his head at the air of Stillwater, which was clear enough but for the black smoke of coal fires streaming from chimneys. I am not overly concerned with air and told him so.

  I quizzed him on latitude, then longitude. On both, he failed me.

  “What is produced there?”

  “Beg pardon?” he said. He was tall and wore a tight striped suit and a western hat. His boots were muddy. I studied his Adam’s apple, which was sizable. His hands were mottled with age spots, though he seemed to be in his forties if I had to guess.

  “How do the Wyomingans, or Wyomans, earn their keep?”

  “Various trades,” he said. He did not seem to have much past some postcards to sell a soul on settling in an area still considered by many the frontier.

  “For example?”

  “Most are ranchers.”

  “Well, here we go,” I said. “A breeze has blown up, and the kindling is caught! Continue.”

  He smiled, encouraged.

  “There’s mining!”

  “Of what material?”

  “Coal. Ore. Copper. Silver.”

  My father was in the process of reinventing himself as a miner of silver, according to my most recent correspondence with my mother. Actually, she said he had bought a stake in a silver mine in Texas and was going to “mine silver,” but “miner of silver” sounds more passive and therefore accurate.

  “I do not want to teach anywhere near a silver mine,” I said.

  “Are you okay with sheep and cattle?”

  “I know nothing of sheep but that they are said to lack independence. I am fond of cows. And horses too.”

  “We got more of them than we do people.”

  “And what of culture?”

  “I hear there is a movement afoot to change the state motto.”

  “Progressive,” I said. “But I am afraid I am wasting your good time. I’m just finishing my first year in the School of Education.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “I’ve three more years yet to go.”

  “You mean in order to acquire your degree?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not something we can’t work around. Can you produce a letter of recommendation describing your progress thus far? Normally I would ask also for some testimony as to your fine character, but already our short interview suggests this is not necessary.”

  “Was it the longitude or the latitude?”

  “It was the one about the culture.”

  I thought, Edith Gotswegon, that the educational standards in Wyoming must not be terribly high given their representative. I thought also about the letter he was requesting. Of course the first person who came to mind to ask (the person who knew my mind best) was not who I ended up asking. I would never ask him for anything. If I were driven mad by starvation, and a biblical or secular plague had wiped out all the food on earth except for a crust of rat-nibbled-upon bread, which he held out to me, I would subsist ere longer on my inner strength, which is formidable. Also, Edith Gotswegon, what would he know of my character? Obviously nothing, as he seriously misjudged it.

  One might expect a woman who, partway through her first year in college, was thrown over by her fiancé for her younger sister, to suffer academically as a result. But my grades improved. I had not a foolish boy masquerading as a man to distract me. I had rid my hair of lice. My living quarters were free of vermin, as if the act of his throwing me over for my little sister was but a cat that now lived only to trap repellent rodents.

  It is a complicated metaphor and I did not expect you to follow it. I should have begun this missive, Edith Gotswegon, by advising you to skip past anything that is over your head. Also and in addition, if you do not get the joke, there is no need to laugh.

  “I can produce said letter within a few days’ time,” I told the recruiter.

  “My train leaves for Laramie at nine in the morning,” he said.

  “I will go now to the office of my professor and have his testimony to you within the hour.”

  In fifty-eight minutes I returned with the document, and for the second time in my life, a man called me “precise,” though this time I did not mind at all.

  Two weeks later an official offer arrived in the post. I was to teach in Sheridan, which by Wyoming standards is a metropolis. It is in the northern part of the state, not far from the Montana border. There is a railroad terminal there as well as a stockyard. I was offered the quite unbelievable sum of fifty dollars a month. Room and board is not included in the deal. I was instructed to look for housing in the home of a local family. This struck me as an odd provision to include in an official offer, but I suppose there had been issues with teachers living above saloons or in tent cities. The letter writer, a Mr. Gordon, superintendent of Sheridan County schools, said that the schools ran through the summer because of the severity of the winters, which would make travel to and from school difficult even for town children apparently. You yourself are more or less a town child, Edith Gotswegon, and if you ever missed school due to weather, I don’t recall it. I remember you as always being there, as if you were glued to your seat in the front row, answering questions with what might charitably be called alacrity.

  I was needed there just a few weeks after the semester ended. That left me no time to visit my family and say goodbye, so I wrote posthaste to my mother to inform her of my plans. She begged me to stay in school and attain my degree, but frankly (may I be frank, E. G.?) I did not see the point of it, since I had been offered a job with only a year of university. Of course in some backwater areas of the country they will hire teachers who have not attended university at all and have no training—I think you know where and to whom I am referring—but the education I received in Stillwater in one year undid the damage done me—and you—by our former teacher, whose methods were questionable and shockingly imprecise.

  Because I was busy with my schoolwork, I was not able to attend the “wedding” of my sister to Gus McQueen, which took place at the courthouse, presided over by a justice of the peace. According to a letter I received addressed to a horse (it is a long story, Edith Gotswegon, and because of my respect for you, you will be spared it), her “reception” was attended only by two of the three Bulgarian boys who lived close by and
who apparently came only for the cake.

  If the description of this event was meant to make me feel guilty, it failed; it made me feel pity, which calls for far less emotional investment than guilt.

  It has been so long, Edith Gotswegon, since we’ve talked. How wonderful to be back in touch. In the letter I received from your mother, I reveled in your good fortune. A daring young engineer husband. A mock Tudor house at 3 Winthrop Manor. (Every house should have the wit to mock some style of architecture!) I imagine that your in-laws reside at 1 Winthtrop Manor and that you have married into an old and established family there in Oklahoma City. I am sure there are options open to anyone lucky enough to have money to burn in the stove to warm your kitchen on a brisk fall morning, when you have nothing at all to do but read the society column in the Oklahoman. I imagine you are a regular reader now that you have entered society, though you never showed any interest in the Kiowa County News, bless that veritable fount of knowledge from which I learned not only how to spell but some part of what I know of human nature.

  It is nature itself with which I have been acquainting myself here in Wyoming. I am not unacquainted with nature, having grown up—well, you know where I grew up—but this is nature of a completely different order. I am five feet seven inches tall and have never felt less until I stepped off the train in Sheridan. In the distance loomed the Bighorns, as advertised by the learned recruiter, but they were far more imposing than the postcard. This is as it should be, I realize, though my father once showed me a photo of the Fountain of Youth in Florida that made it seem magical, and he claimed to have gone there once and found nothing but a weed-choked dip in the ground covered by a rusted grate. Photographs, my point being, can lie. But so can my father, and others.

  The mountains seemed very close—right atop the city, as if I could reach up and touch them—though the kindly porter who helped me with my bags told me they were a hard two-hour ride away, depending on your mount. Between the city and the mountains, as clouds pass over the sun, huge shadows patchwork the vast valley. They move slowly, the clouds, darkening splotches of pasture and grassland. I could watch them out the window all the day long.