Elise chose not to repeat Damyan’s opinion of Gus—that he was not much.
A wind blew up, carrying the smell of west Texas—dust, creosote, and cattle. Elise loved their cottage by the creek, but sometimes she felt hemmed in by the mountains. Only when she was atop, beneath, or alongside her husband, only in the stolen sprawling and rapturous hours, did she feel the endless prairie. She stretched her legs toward it, like a chute toward the sun.
“Another thing I wonder is what Joe Dudley out of Odessa thinks I needed your help with here at home.”
“Why don’t you ask him?” said Gus.
“Lorena used to always say that. Every time I would ask her a question she did not want to answer. For instance, once I asked her why you never told us the name of your horse and she said, ‘Why don’t you ask him?’”
“She is direct, your sister.”
“Am I direct?”
“You are more abrupt than direct.”
Elise understood that abrupt was worse than direct. Did it not mean rude? Did Gus find her rude and Lorena honest? Oh well, she was certainly capable of rudeness.
“I never told you what I said to Miss Pruett in your parlor.”
“Who is Miss Pruett again?”
“The rich woman who felt that learning to play the piano would guarantee her a suitable match. She was at your house the weekend you had gone to Stillwater to propose. I had left you a note. She was not gifted and I lied and told her she was playing beautifully and excused myself to go rifle through your sock drawer. I still want to rifle through your sock drawer. It is an impulse, I suppose, like the tendency toward spirits, which I hear never leaves you. You can only stave it off, not make it go away entirely. Speaking of spirits and returning to the subject of Damyan, I hope his use of spirits has not become habitual. I suspect it has. Anyway, Miss Pruett: I was trying to get her to leave so I could go run my hands through your socks. I must have said something uncomplimentary about Lone Wolf because she asked me if I was leaving and at that moment I realized that I was. With or without you, Gus McQueen. Miss Pruett said, Well I hope you don’t take your leave before I master Chopin, or some other composer, I can’t remember, and I said that I would prefer to make my exit while I still had a tooth in my head and a decent figure.”
Gus laughed. He was messily eating a peach. Across the way, Elise’s mother was sitting on the front porch of her casita. She suffered from rheumatism and sadness, but she never complained. She did not like to leave her little house, with its calico curtains, so the children took her most meals and Elise and Gus stopped in several times a day.
“What did she have to say to that?” said Gus. He tossed the peach pit into the yard, because he had told her that another tree would grow from it. He thought this also about the watermelon seeds he spit off the porch, despite zero evidence of peach trees or watermelon vines in the yard.
“She said that it was true what they said about me in Lone Wolf.”
“Whatever happened to Miss Pruett, I would like to know. Probably the same thing that happened to Edith Gotswegon.”
Edith Gotswegon made her think of Lorena. It had been more than twenty years since they had seen her. She thought of her many times during the day. She read aloud to Lorena from the newspaper as she was laying it out. The children, who were there to assist her but mostly played with cast-off letters from the linotype, dipping them in ink provided by Gus, thought she was reading to them. They ignored her in order to ruin their clothes with ink stains. Elise could say anything and they would think it was some boring quote from News from the Toyahvale Community. So she said, aloud, to Lorena: I wonder why you chose to live some place so cold. A place where blizzards far worse than the one that took my toes and my finger, not even to mention my nose, are as routine as a new moon. Elise wasn’t sure what, exactly, was behind this question. An accusation? An insinuation that Lorena could handle, every other Tuesday in the worst of the winter months, the sort of weather that maimed her sister? Elise had always scoffed when people said, I don’t even know where to begin. You just choose where to begin. You don’t begin in the beginning. Begin with, say, the prairie. Just pick a word and say it out loud and you are somewhere else.
But then there was Lorena, whom she had not seen in over two decades. She had so many questions for her, so many things she wondered about. Elise did not know where to start and it made her feel stupid and old.
“Have we gotten old, Gus?”
At forty-one, Gus did not look old, though he was thicker about the stomach. His sandy-blond hair was thinning at the crown, requiring him to don a ridiculous straw hat on the sunniest days to keep his scalp from crisping. Elise was thirty-seven. Her hips had broadened and her breasts felt different. She shared this fact with her daughter Lorena, who was nineteen then and mortified by her mother talking about how her breasts felt.
“I would like to take us on a vacation,” said Gus. In answer, Elise supposed, to her query about their being old? She did not mean to imply that they were too old to travel.
“To Lone Wolf? To visit the prairie dogs in their tidy villages?”
“I bet they have a post office by now.”
“Where would you really like to go, because I know it is not Lone Wolf.”
“To see my aunt Mattie. Before she dies.”
“I would love to see the place you come from,” said Elise. “I have always wanted to. But should we go, I have two questions. The first is, What about Mother?”
“Juana and Rodrigo could see to her needs while we’re gone.”
“Juana and Rodrigo have five grandchildren and they also have jobs.”
“She could come along?” said Gus.
“I’m not sure she could make the trip. But if we did take her, might we visit Knox College in Illinois? It would mean the world to her to go back there.”
“I’d have to look at a map, but it’s not in the wrong direction. We could head east and then take the kids to see Washington, D.C.”
“I would like to see the oversize seated Lincoln.”
“I would like to go to the Library of Congress. If going to Knox College would make your mother happy, it is worth the detour. What is your other question?”
“I now have two.”
“Understandable,” said Gus. “Questions are like rabbits.”
“The first is, Who would run the paper in your absence?”
“Joe Dudley out of Odessa, as you insist on calling him. You will say that he cannot spell and it is true, but I have bought him a new dictionary put out by American Heritage. It feels comprehensive when you lift it. I will fine him a nickel for every misspelling.”
“You had best charge a penny for every misplaced apostrophe.”
“We could pay for the trip and have enough left over to finally buy a truck. The paper is in dire need of a truck. What is your other question?”
What Elise wanted to ask was, How do you know your aunt is alive still? but she decided that was too abrupt. Instead she said, “How old would she be now?”
“I am not exactly sure. I think seventy-three. If she were alive, my mother would be seventy-five.”
“How old is your father?”
“My father is dead.”
Elise looked at Gus. He was staring at the ground, as if he expected the peach pit to have sprouted already and was watching a tree slowly grow.
First he had claimed his father was dead and then he said he was not dead and now he was saying he was dead. She was fine with the story changing, but at this point she felt it ought to be verified.
“You’ve had word of this?”
“I wrote the editor of the paper in Statesville, where my father was living.”
“You wanted to know?”
“Not really,” he said.
“You could not have just asked your aunt?”
“Elise,” said Gus. Which meant: I know that you know that every letter I have ever written to her is at the bottom of my sock drawer. And also: I suspect
you are familiar with their contents.
In fact, Gus was in the habit of sealing his letters, which made it impossible to snoop without getting caught. Over the years, the strip of glue weakens; the seal, worn out by time itself, gives way. She read snippets of an early one, written in Lone Wolf. She remembered only his description of the prairie, which was both overly composed and so touching (because Elise felt that the true subject of his tribute was not the prairie but their burgeoning love) that she copied it down and committed it to memory:
The landscape, so different from our own, is appealing in a stark way. The prairie is the physical evocation of a mood I have never experienced. It brings out in me feelings I did not know possible. Some might call it bleak, but bleak is not the opposite of lush. There is bounty here, of a far different stripe than our verdant foliage, the wild green explosion that is spring in the high piedmont of North Carolina. The prairie grass sings in the evening wind. Free from the impediment of forest or mountain, light lingers long of an evening, and the suns appears to lower itself beneath the lip of earth itself, instead of behind tree line or hill. Even on the shortest, coldest days of winter, the fact that a gaze in any direction affords an open and expansive vista, of field and grass and sky, gives a body a sense of freedom and, curiously, of movement. It’s hard to feel hemmed in here.
“Do they help, the letters you write?”
“Did they help, is the question. I’ve not written one for some time.”
“Did they?”
“Yes,” he said. “And no, because they made me miss her and all I want her to know is how grateful I am to her, but I can never seem to find the right words to tell her. It makes me feel bad to even think about it, much less talk about it. So, no. I would not say they have helped.”
Elise, thinking of the letters she had written Sandy, knew she would have died had she not written them. She was most grateful to Sandy and of course to Gus, both of whom heard her true cry. Also to her mother. She was grateful to Lorena, so grateful, because the blanket was the sky, and words were wind, and when the blanket was unpinned and they were exposed to the elements, their frozen words fell to the ground, tinkling like broken glass.
“What did the editor of the paper in Statesville say?”
“He sent an obituary.”
“Oh.”
“I was not included among the list of my father’s survivors.”
Elise reached out for her husband, but he shifted in his seat and she managed to grab only his elbow. “I’m sorry, Gus.”
“For what? I am certain the obituary was written by his second wife. That is the custom there, for the next of kin to write the obituary. It certainly makes it more entertaining, though it allows what should be factual to be colored by revenge or exaggeration. But I am not upset by it, because, in fact, I did not survive him. I think of him still and with not a little anger. Had I survived him, I would think of him either not at all or with love.”
You are putting a lot of emphasis on the word “survived,” Elise thought to say but did not. She liked that he refused to take the word literally but understood that he felt about his father the same way Lorena had always felt about their father: abandoned.
The children ran up from the creek. Leslie had left home and was working as a ranch hand near Marathon. Both Gus and Elise had wanted him to attend college, but he had loved horses ever since Elise had tried to pin them in a blanket and take a ride in the snow, and all he wanted was his own cattle ranch.
Lorena stooped to tie Mattie’s shoe. She was a good sister and as serious in some ways as her namesake. She had put off college to help Elise take care of the children, but she had been accepted at Sul Ross State Teacher’s College down in Alpine for the next year. Elise realized that when she was Lorena’s age, she had met Mr. McQueen already. She had the same number of fingers and toes as the rest of the world. Perhaps she even made very good sense back then, but she doubted it, and besides, that was never her goal in life.
She remembered when her sister was always going on about the point of life. It made her smile.
Henry said to Gus: “Daddy, you promised you’d make us peach ice cream.”
Gus said to Henry: “Since you have been gone, I have grown too old and feeble to crank the handle or handle the crank.”
Henry and Mattie said together that they would crank the handle and handle the crank. In fact, they would fight for the chance to crank the handle for a half hour, until the ice cream was thick.
Inside, Lorena peeled peaches while Elise made the custard.
“On the way back from the creek, we stopped by to see Grandmother and she thought I was my aunt,” Lorena said.
“Well, you do share a name, and you favor some.”
“No, it was more than that. She got up and hugged me so hard I think it scared Mattie and maybe Henry too. ‘You’ve come finally,’ she said. ‘Right on time too. How was the trip?’”
“She said that?”
“Yes. It was odd. And she didn’t sound . . .”
“What?” Elise worried that Lorena was going to say “crazy,” a term Elise detested.
“Like she was remembering something from a long time ago.”
Well, it could not be that, for Lorena had never visited them here.
“I will go and ask her if she wants ice cream. Keep an eye on the stove.”
Her mother was still on the porch. She wore a housedress, boots she wore everywhere in Shafter to guard against snakebite, and a light smile.
“You will never guess!” she said to Elise as she drew close enough for her mother, whose eyesight was weakest at dusk, to see who she was.
“What?”
“I had this feeling I would see my oldest child and it got stronger and stronger, this feeling, and then she showed up.”
“Really? How is she?”
“You never wrote to her, Elise. She told me. She looks just as she did when she went off to Stillwater with my trunk. She brought her children. Two boys. They are handsome, and of course you know they would be well mannered.”
It was what she had so long wanted and so long feared. When she was a girl lying in an attic room, Lorena a cot’s length away, she’d feared that her big sister would someday walk past her on the street and not even say “boo.” That had come to pass, if staying clear for twenty-odd years were the same as snubbing her on the sidewalk.
“I hope she decides to visit me as well,” said Elise. “Do you want to come for peach ice cream?”
“Oh, I’m to bed soon, darling. I have had a lot of excitement for one day, as they say. Though I have never understood how you can have too much excitement and why that is a bad thing, as they imply it might be.”
“I believe they are using the word in a different way,” said Elise, thinking of Gus having survived, or not survived, his father.
“That’s the problem with words,” said her mother. “I taught you that. Did I not?”
“You did, Mother,” said Elise, even though she felt it was perhaps something she had figured out on her own.
A date was set for their trip. Joe Dudley agreed to the terms of a nickel per misspelled word but balked at the apostrophe, telling Gus that he could not even spell apostrophe, how was he meant to use one correctly? He said he’d just as soon not use one at all. Gus told him that if he could put out an issue of the paper without using an apostrophe he was a grammatical genius. Joe Dudley heard only genius which, coming out of Odessa as he did, had never been applied to him. He beamed.
The house filled up with road maps. Maps on the kitchen table, maps on the children’s walls, a map on the back of a toilet.
“Do they not all show the same routes?” Elise asked her husband.
“Oddly enough, no,” Gus said. “Turns out there are dozens of ways to get from west Texas to North Carolina via Knox College and Washington, D.C. What would I know about such, having come west by train?”
Elise thought of Charlie Carter. She wondered where he was now, if he
had found his Beulah girl, or if he had continued to fill the hole she left in his life with drink.
“New roads are being built all the time,” Gus was saying with an enthusiasm that both amused and slightly unnerved her. “We will be at least twelve days on the road, maybe longer. Some of these maps will be obsolete tomorrow. I will have to buy new ones.”
“Well, we will need to hitch a trailer to the car just to haul them if you don’t quit.”
“That is another thing we need to discuss.”
“Which?”
“Luggage.”
Elise said she had lived her entire life without discussing luggage and even her deep love for Gus would not allow her to break her streak.
“Fine,” said Gus. “We can talk about clothes.”
“What I like to talk about is the weather with people who clearly have no interest in the weather,” said Elise.
It was night again. Sandy was off someplace interesting. The west Texas sky stretched above them like the curve of the universe, star-studded, blue-black, brilliant. The coyotes were on about something. The children were either asleep or pretending to sleep. Gus was lying across their bed studying a map that covered the mattress. It was creased, torn, massive.
“Is that a bedspread or a map or both?” said Elise. “Does it have Asia Minor on it, because if it does not, it should.”
“I remember once asking you what you wanted to do when you graduated and you told me you were going to go on a grand concert tour of Asia Minor.”
“Yes? And?”
“And here we are in Texas.”
“Do I understand you to be suggesting that I have not fulfilled my hopes and dreams?”
“No. I am saying that I am happy.”
“Saying you are in Texas and saying you are happy are not synonymous,” she said. She thought for a moment, and added, “Not for everyone at least. Plus, you are happy because when I was not looking you amassed a library of road maps.”
“Come over here,” he said, but she didn’t. She was combing her hair, which had not been combed in days. Several teeth on her comb were sacrificed to the effort, which Elise found funny. She laughed as she pulled out the broken teeth and examined them carefully, as if they were gems sifted from buckets of creek mud.
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