Though I have gone on record as being largely unconcerned with air, I must say that I now understand the recruiter’s metaphor. There is something of a mountain stream in the taste of the air (or what I imagine a mountain stream must taste of, having never seen a mountain higher than those of the Wichita range, which are anthills compared) once you get away from the smoke of the steam engine and into town proper.
Before I provide a thumbnail description of the town proper, I should pause and say that I have often imagined leaving Lone Wolf and, indeed, have long fantasized myself in exotic locales. A western outpost filled with ranch hands spilling out of saloons to spit into gutters was not among these locales. Like many a progressive-minded midwestern girl, I saw myself in Chicago. Now is perhaps the time to confess to having asked the recruiter another question, the answer of which sealed my fate.
“How far is Wyoming from here?”
“From Oklahoma?”
“From where we stand.”
“Well, I came through Chicago. So it’s hard to hard to gauge the distance as the crow flies.”
“I am not a crow and I won’t be flying. All trains go to Chicago. If you were going to see the Pyramids in ancient Egypt, it is said that you would first have to change trains in Chicago.”
“Is that a fact?” he said. “Ancient Egypt?”
“How long did it take, no matter your route, for you to travel from Wyoming to Stillwater?”
He thought about it while working a toothpick between his teeth, which is something I have seen other men do when considering the distance between places, a curious and unseemly habit.
“Two and a half days,” he said. “But they were hard ones.”
It was then that I agreed to go. Had there been someone there recruiting for schools in Maine, and had the recruiter worked his toothpick and come up with an answer exceeding two and a half days in duration, I would be getting reacquainted with you from Maine.
But here I am. I have taken rooms with a Mrs. O’Connelly. She is Irish, Edith Gotswegon, which means she is a both a pious Catholic and partial to spirits. She speaks to me harshly of her six boys, who are more or less grown and live in the area, and indeed one of them told me she was in the regular habit of boxing his ears for every impertinence when he was younger, but when they all show up for Sunday supper she puts on such a spread and is so indulgent and tolerant of their crude table manners and incessant interrupting of endless stories involving the high jinks of their youth that I find it hard to believe her ever a strict disciplinarian. I like it when “the boys” come, because otherwise it is just the two of us and a Mr. Richard, who quarters in a basement room by the boiler. He is a desk clerk at a local hotel and he has a persistent cough that I have heard described in books as “hacking.” I can hear it even two floors above, though he is rarely there—he seems to take his meals at the hotel. He does not attend Sunday suppers with “the boys.” Once I asked Mrs. O’Connelly what Mr. Richard did of a weekend and she rolled her eyes and laughed her raunchy Irish laugh. When something amuses her, her cheeks turn pink as does her laugh. I like her, though she often reeks of sherry.
I am not so sure you would like her, Edith Gotswegon. She is a far cry from 3 Winthrop Manor. The only way she might appear in those hallowed halls is in service, uniformed and aproned and cooking up her specialty, a stew of lamb and potatoes. That brings me to a point. I do have one; this letter is not just to describe the hacking cough of Mr. Richard. The manner in which I chose to move two-and-a-half hard days’ train travel from Oklahoma may seem impetuous. Perhaps it may even seem petty to some. I have admitted that I based my decision on distance, and that not much forethought was applied. But I am here now and I have made a choice to live my life among the sort of plainspoken, honest, heartfelt people around whom I was raised (people not unlike yourself, Edith Gotswegon). My dreams of Chicago mostly took me over in the afternoons, after school, when I wasted much time combing my hair with my mother’s comb-and-mirror set. I imagined myself working for a newspaper, writing my very own column, which thousands would read while sipping their morning coffee. I would be known across the city and beyond. But then something happened that convinced me that these sorts of dreams, of glamour and city lights, of lipstick and fame, are but a manifestation of a certain kind of pride. I have nothing against pride, if it is used as motivation to better your circumstances and stand up for yourself. But my mother, weakened though she was by the loss of our brothers to typhoid, is an example of a debilitating meekness, and my father an example of the dangers of pride, since he used it as an excuse not to soil and callous his hands with hard work (or, actually, any kind of work). When I went away to Stillwater, my mother presented me with her steamer trunk, which she had kept hidden from us all these years. Inside one of its various compartments was the aforementioned mother-of-pearl comb-and-mirror set. Laid atop it was a train letter in which my mother, in a rare show of support, expressed how proud she was of me and how good I had always been to my younger sister. I saved her life, Edith Gotswegon. Everyone knows that I saved her life. Once, during the half week when you and I were friends, you mentioned that your brother, who is commonly thought of as slow, was breached at birth, and you inquired of me if the same circumstances had not befallen my sister. My sister is not slow. Her mind is forever alight. She is the opposite of slow. She is scheming, always.
I saved her life, so that she might ruin mine.
After a certain schoolteacher threw me over for my sister, I sent the trunk home. It was meant to be a wedding present to my sister. I included the comb-and-mirror set with a note to my sister, which was brief, and if by any chance the intended party of this letter, which is not you, Edith Gotswegon, did not receive the steamer trunk and its contents, which were only the brief letter and the comb-and-mirror set, I repeat the letter here, in its entirety: “Mother-of-pearl is not pearl.”
My sister is not slow. She is the opposite of slow. I have no doubt she understood my meaning.
It occurs to me that now that you are married, you have changed your name? No matter, for I will always know you as you were when I last saw you, and never will I ever think of you as anyone other than Edith Gotswegon.
I sincerely hope all is well there with you—and with yours!
For you flicked your tongue, and you made him yours.
Oh yes you did did.
Sincerely,
Lorena Stewart
PART THREE
11
GUS MCQUEEN
Fort Davis, Texas, 1935
Only at night, after the children were in bed (they had four now: Leslie was sixteen, Lorena was fifteen, Henry was seven, and Mattie had just turned three), did Gus have time to talk to his wife. They had been married seventeen years and he still wanted to talk to Elise or, better yet, listen to her, but there was so much work to be done, both at the newspaper and at home, that they scarcely had the chance during the day.
When the children were asleep, or at least in their beds, Gus and Elise closed the door to their bedroom. Even little Mattie, who was prone to nightmares, knew not to knock. Elise liked to lie with her head on Gus’s stomach, her feet on the wall next to the bed. “Count my toes,” she would say, and Gus would say, always, that he couldn’t count that high. Sometimes Elise would read aloud to Gus her favorite parts of the paper. They would say what happened that day and then they would, too quietly for both their tastes (for the house was not that big and sound carried), begin stripping off each other’s clothes and kissing their way up and down each other’s body before one ended up atop the other. Soon they would trade off, as they were in every way democratic.
But first, they would talk.
Gus rarely spoke of his life before he came to Lone Wolf, for by that point he had spent more time in Oklahoma and Texas than he had back east. But one night, when they were lamenting how little time they had to be together in the way they craved (alone, slowly stripping and kissing), he told Elise about how when he was living with hi
s aunt—and even before, when he was with his father still—he was terrified of time.
“Terrified how and terrified why?” said Elise.
“It just seemed so vast.”
He had school to go to when it was in session, he said, and there was the long walk to and from school, almost an hour each way. He had his chores both before and after school and, from the age of twelve, his job at the millinery. And still, he said, there were all these hours. He remembered them, looming, a blankness stretching away like desert or prairie to an eye unaccustomed to the bounty of both.
“Time was the enemy,” he said. “I wanted to run and hide from it.”
“In the hayloft?”
“Every night I went to the river that ran behind both my father’s house and my aunt’s. I’ve told you about the river before.”
“Where you saw the sheep,” said Elise.
“Yes.”
“You told me first when we were floating in the Red River.”
“Yes.”
“Say more about the river. I much prefer it to the Natchez Trace.”
“One of these days I am going to throw you in the back of the truck and drive you to the Natchez Trace and leave you there.”
“Return me to the river, please,” said Elise.
But he couldn’t tell her how it had been for him, though he remembered it perfectly. Every night he planned to cross over. The other side seemed the answer to his problems—or maybe to the question he did not know how to ask. Over there, the trees fluttered in a breeze that never reached him. No-see-ums would swarm him and he would swat at the air like a blind man. The sun would go down as he sat there, looking west, toward Lone Wolf. Every leaf and twig on the other side would turn golden. If only we had settled over there, he would think. If only I had the courage to cross.
“I wanted to cross it.”
“What kept you from it?”
“More than one thing,” said Gus, confident and grateful that Elise would not ask him to list all the things, as anyone else might have done.
Elise was silent for a long while and then said, “I felt the same, darling.”
“In the hayloft?”
“Atop Sandy. I would ride him across the prairie all night long, while listening to Lorena’s sleep-breath trying to boss me around in our attic room with the two saggy cots.”
There came a hard knocking on the front door.
Gus let in a rider, a young man name Mills, who had something to do with the silver mine. He had ridden up from Shafter to inform them of Mr. Stewart’s passing.
“How did he expire?” asked Elise.
This Mills looked into Elise’s eyes and then away. He appeared to decide something.
“He said he would like it to be known that he met his end in a mining accident.”
“Which means he did not.”
“No ma’am,” said Mills.
“I am grateful to you for not lying,” she said. “How did he actually expire?”
“He took sick.”
“What variety of sickness?”
“That I don’t know, ma’am.”
“No doctor was called?”
“That’s the strange part,” said Mills.
Gus watched Elise carefully. Her expression shifted as she appeared to understand what had happened in the adobe shack.
“Why is it strange?” she said. “Doctors in these parts are known to be addicted to that patent medicine they peddle.”
“Yes ma’am,” said Mills. He seemed relieved by this response rather than challenged by it. “That one comes up from Presidio is a known drunkard.”
“Precisely. It is an occupational hazard and one that can be forgiven until their services are gravely needed, at which point . . .” She seemed to grow bored with this notion and asked if her father lingered.
“He did.”
“How long?”
“A week or more, as I heard it.”
“And my mother?”
“She stayed by his side.”
“Is anyone with her now?”
“An old Mexican woman by the name of Pilar. She is said to be a healer. It is my understanding that Pilar covered your father in poultices made from agave pulp and ground sage and some other ingredients, but it must have been too late.”
“When was Pilar called for and by whom?”
“By your mother and toward the end.”
Elise nodded. “You’ll stay the night. I will ride down with you in the morning.” She led Mills upstairs and cleared a bed for him by picking up a sleeping child and dropping it into a bunk alongside two other sleeping children. There were noises that were not words, a rustle of readjustment and then quiet.
Alone in their bedroom, Elise said, “Juana will care for the children while you are at work.”
“Ought I not come along?”
“What for?”
“It just seems proper.”
“At last he has struck it rich,” said Elise. “He is turning blue in the snowy heavens.”
Gus put his arms around her.
“Or not,” she said. “You’ll telegram Lorena in the morning?”
“Of course,” said Gus. “Shall I tell her you will wait for her arrival to commence with the burial?”
“It is two-and-a-half hard days’ train travel from wherever she was in Wyoming to Stillwater, according to the letter she wrote to me via Edith Gotswegon some fifteen years ago now.”
“Perhaps she has moved.”
“She has. Mother hears from her and has given me her new address.”
“Have you written to her?”
“I have not. Have you?”
They rarely talked about Lorena. At first they did—it would have seemed all the more the betrayal had they not—but it had all happened so long ago. But Gus knew that Elise missed her. He knew she thought about her. He thought of her sometimes himself, with more than a little guilt but never regret.
“Of course I have not written to her,” said Gus.
Elise was silent, so Gus said, “What do you think your mother would want?”
“Mother of Pearl,” said Elise. They stood together by the bed, Gus’s arms around her, but she was moving, she was adrift.
“What about your father?” she said upon her sudden and unsettling return.
“My father?” Gus said.
“Do you want to know if he lives still?”
Gus thought about the last time he saw his father. He and his aunt had taken the bus to Statesville, and his father asked him if there was a girl in the picture, and Gus remembered how affronted he was by his father’s use of the word picture as the two plump kids ran in circles and his father’s bony wife would not look Gus in the eye. He remembered on the bus ride home his aunt said only, “My land.” He remembered seeing farmers burning leaves in barrels in the side yards and the brilliant foliage of fall in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.
He thought about how he wanted to see his aunt again.
“Yes,” he said, but he was speaking of his aunt. He was worried she would leave without his having the chance to say goodbye.
“He needs to be put in the ground,” she said, about her own father, Gus assumed. She was adrift again. “If Mother has not done it already.”
“She can come live with us now.”
“Yes.”
“Rodrigo and I can build her a casita back by the creek.”
“She will require curtains.”
“That can be done.”
“And she’ll need some new dresses.”
“We will see to it. Are you sure you don’t want me to come along?” said Gus.
“You’ve a newspaper to put out.”
“Joe Dudley can manage without me for a few days.”
“Joe Dudley cannot spell properly.”
This was true. Like many a smooth talker, and successful salesman, he was barely literate.
In two days’ time, Elise returned with her mother. If there was any sort of funeral, Gus nev
er heard of it. He never learned where his father-in-law was buried. The only thing he ever heard Mrs. Stewart say was that it was a shame Lorena was too busy to come.
The morning Elise left with the fellow Mills, she had handed Gus a telegram to send to Lorena.
father killed in mining accident stop mother has come to live with us stop she would love to see you again stop as would sister stop oh she would would she yes she would would
At the Western Union office, the telegraph officer read it and opened his mouth, but before words came out Gus said, “Type exactly as written, please.” It was beyond him to explain what he could not understand. He did not need to understand it. He did and did not understand what his aunt meant when on the bus back from Statesville she said “My land” and then nothing for miles and miles while he looked out the window at the men leaning on shovels, keeping watch over piles of burning leaves.
There was much that Gus half-understood, and much that he did not understand at all.
Once, at work at the newspaper office, scrambling to get the paper out on deadline, he felt nauseated. He wondered if it weren’t something he’d eaten, then realized he’d not eaten all day. To think food was the culprit, instead of the lack of it—it took him back to Hibriten, where he was so often hungry and where he often blamed his loneliness on the actions or reactions of others, not knowing his pain came from waiting for things to begin.
Parts of him, left behind, scattered about. He liked to remember waiting out lunch hour in the woods, pulling back pine bark to study the hieroglyphics of burrowing bugs. He liked remembering the nights he was so anxious about the next day’s classes that he rose from the cot in the teacherage, built a fire in the classroom, and stayed up filling the board with figures and facts until the children began to trickle in.
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