“Yesterday, or maybe it wasn’t yesterday, but recently, Mother thought our Lorena was that Lorena.” She felt a little guilty about the “that,” did Elise.
“So maybe there was some notice after all?”
“She could not have gotten word to Mother without our knowing it. Mother never leaves the house.”
“Well,” said Gus.
“She was mean about Mattie and your aunt.”
“Well.”
“But Gus! Never ever ask a woman where she met her husband.”
“Why not?”
“Think about it.”
“Okay,” said Gus. “I will.”
“Never mind. I have a joke.”
“You don’t know any jokes.”
“I know one. Why did the rancher go to the classroom?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I don’t know why either.”
“You need a punch line for it to qualify as a joke,” Gus said.
“But I don’t like that part. I only like the question part.”
“In other words, you don’t care why the chicken crossed the road.”
“I just assume it had good reason, and I have never understood why it is anyone’s business other than the chicken’s. The answer to the question should be ‘none of your business.’ But on the subject of crossing the road, what about our trip?” said Elise.
“Postponed.”
“Really, Gus?” She had not thought of it until that moment. She had never been on a real trip and she was in her fourth decade.
“Well, we are to leave in two days. Surely she did not come all the way from Montana to stay two days. I imagine it took longer than two days for them to get down here.”
“Not Montana, Wyoming. Recluse, Wyoming. It sounds made up.”
Gus said, “I believe it is a real place, because based on what I have seen of that boy, he does not make things up.”
“She hates me still.”
“She laughed at some of the things you said.”
“She is unused to humor. So unused to it that she laughs at things that come out of my mouth that are not funny.”
Elise’s thoughts twirled round in her head. All these years, she’d never stopped thinking about her sister. The first time Elise heard an oscillating fan, she thought she was hearing herself thinking about Lorena. Close in and loud and faint and far away came the noise of the untrained fan, and that was the noise of Elise thinking of her sister in the now and her sister in the past.
“The children will be so upset.”
“Yes, well. They have their cousins to get to know.”
“I am not going to say a word. I am not even going to whisper.”
“Don’t.” Gus began to unload the bags. He handed one to Elise and she started for the house but stopped after a few steps.
“And Mother! I told her we were going to see Knox College and she got excited about packing up her trunk.”
“We hardly have room for it,” said Gus.
“It could hold all your maps.”
“The maps!” said Gus. “We must hurry and hide them lest your sister know we were about to go away on vacation.”
“I don’t care to hide things from her now,” said Elise.
“I don’t want to make her feel uncomfortable.”
“We are twenty-odd years too late for that.”
They put Lorena’s bags in their room. They put all the children in the room they’d added upstairs. They would sleep on the floor by the fire. Their children were due home from school any minute. Gus had gathered up all his maps and stowed them away somewhere, and Lorena, her Lorena, would know as soon as she walked in the house that they were not going on their trip. She would sulk in the manner of her namesake, whom in this way she favored.
When would they ever have time to go on a trip? Why had Lorena decided to come back here now?
Time was an element that fell like snow from the sky. The sky was stitched together with safety pins, but sometimes the pins worked loose and out came the elements and one of them was time. Mrs. García waited on Wednesdays for her paper, and the editor himself delivered it, his boot steps on her porch setting off the barks of her two Chihuahuas, but the next day she wanted another paper. She would not recognize that it came only once a week. People could not hear time. They could not hear wind and they could not recognize the true cries of others. They talked over it and heard only some great strange gargle. In the distance, like a coyote wind, it murmured, this muted lament of love and of time. Love and time fell from the sky like snow, or floated across it, like clouds, and people washed their socks or nibbled corn on the cob, their chins shiny with butter.
Elise said, not to Gus but to Sandy, “We almost died out there.”
Twenty-odd years had passed and Elise still felt the same way she had when she had waited in Gus’s house for him to come home from school. She wanted to sit on his porch with him and listen to Lone Wolf. She wanted to hear what he heard (a refrigerator door sucking shut in the night, the hollow clank of naked coat hangers in an empty closet) and to be, only to be, with him. But he wasn’t there and she was alone. Now, all these years later, she felt alone.
The children had burst through the door, shedding their books and coats and descending on the refrigerator, its door sucking shut.
“We should go tell them we’re going to have to postpone our trip,” Elise said to Gus, but Gus was in the kitchen already with the children. She was alone, but why?
Sandy was noticeably absent. She called to him, but nothing.
Lorena was here and she spoke to Elise instead of passing right by her on the sidewalk, but nothing was easy to say, not even hello, see you later, or how old is everybody now?
Elise looked out the window. Here came her sister and her nephew and her niece and her mother across the yard. She looked at her sister and wondered if, should it snow, their mother might pin over them the old Kiowa blanket and slap Sandy on the croup. Off they would go into the world, whispering things with and without words, protected from the cold by the heat of their bodies and the blanket of sky.
She wondered if, had Lorena not forsaken her that day, what it would feel like to go through life with all her toes and fingers and 100 percent of her nose. She was never cold when it was Lorena leading the horse, but then it was Sandy they were riding, not The Beatitudes. Sandy knew the way.
Not a word from Sandy. Elise had never felt so alone, and downstairs, the house had filled with bodies. And in the distance, sweeping across the prairie, the muted lament.
She found them all in the kitchen.
“Mother was telling me about your upcoming trip,” said Lorena.
“Have you met your namesake, Lorena?”
“I have met everyone,” her sister said.
Elise said to her Lorena, “Why don’t you take the boys and your cousins and go to the bluffs to search for arrowheads?”
Her Lorena gave her a look only slightly less annoyed than when asked to take her brothers somewhere, because she too liked to be alone with mother-of-pearl implements of beauty and also movie magazines after school. Who could blame her, at her age?
But there were too many people. It was like Mexico City where the drunken men hang off the trolley cars at dusk.
Then it was Gus, Lorena, and her mother at the kitchen table. Elise made iced tea. She opened the refrigerator more than necessary so that she might listen to its sucking shut.
Lorena said, “The telegram I received after Father’s death said he died in a mining accident.”
Elise said, “We worried that it never reached you,” leaving out the reason why, which was obvious, but not easy to say: You never responded.
“Mother told me it wasn’t a mining accident after all.”
“Did I?” said their mother.
Elise was pouring tea. Gus looked as if he wanted to go back to the office.
Elise said, “Do you need to go back to work, Gus?” and Lorena said, “I think i
t would nice if he stayed for a bit.”
Gus smiled his assent to Lorena, but to Elise his smile said, I believe I might need to stay? His eyebrows were question marks.
“It has been a good while since he died, Lorena,” said Elise. “Going on five years.”
“Not so long that you’ve forgotten how he died.”
“What does it matter to you?” Elise said. “You hated him.”
Her mother said Elise’s name in that way she used to say Lorena’s name when Lorena called their father Harold.
“He was not around enough for me to hate,” said Lorena.
Elise looked at her mother. It was easy to think that her mother had trailed off to Knox College and mostly stayed there, but in fact she had long since returned to the party, though it was often her preference to leave early.
Her mother said, “This is what he wanted you to think and at the time I saw no reason not to honor his wishes. In the long run, I did not see that it would make a lot of difference to either of you.”
“But why, Mother? For years he dragged you around to the most godforsaken places with his ideas of striking it rich and he did not hit a lick at a snake.”
“Hit a lick at a snake” was a phrase her mother used to describe those days, which was often, when she berated herself for not having gotten enough done. At the mention of it she smiled, though she understood that it was she who was being criticized. Elise saw that in her smile.
“Well, how did he die?”
“The causes were natural,” said her mother. Elise could tell Lorena was upsetting her and she knew without ever having discussed it with her mother what had happened, how she had let him linger and finally fetched Pilar the healer to plaster him with useless poultices.
“So you have left your husband?” Elise said to Lorena. It was of no interest to her if Lorena had left the pious rancher, but really she just wanted Lorena to leave their mother alone.
“I have not.”
Then Lorena said a curious thing.
“His ranch has been in his family for four generations.”
“I bet it is lovely country,” said Gus.
“It is vast. It has given me perspective. It has changed me and for the better.”
“Your point being that your husband, having inherited six-thousand-some-odd acres from his ancestors, did not drag you all over kingdom come and he has no problem hitting a lick at a snake,” said Elise. She resented being forced to supply a translation, but a voice from the past kept repeating, over and again, Why don’t you ask her?
Lorena tipped her nose slightly toward the ceiling, which was neither sky nor blanket of sky. It was not even an element and it was certainly nothing to get uppity over.
“My point is that this family has always been given to lies and I have traveled all this way to find it continues. I find this troubling at best and corrosive at worst,” she said.
Elise held up her spoon, examining it in the late afternoon light that turned a square of kitchen floor into gold. She said to the spoon, “What is corroded around here I would love to know.”
“The values by which one lives?” said Lorena.
“Have you turned to God?” Elise’s mother asked her sister, which made Elise laugh.
“I’m not ashamed of it,” Lorena said to Elise.
“Nor should you be,” said their mother. “I played organ for services at Knox College chapel. I ought to have taken you two to church more often. But I let myself go. My boys died and you girls suffered because of my weakness.”
“Prairie fever,” said Elise, to cut her mother off. What was the point of making her pay now? Daily Elise saw the curtains of her casita drawn, an attempt to keep the sadness at bay.
“In a letter I received that was addressed to a horse, the writer of the letter admitted that she knew the real meaning of prairie fever,” said Lorena. “She said also and I quote, ‘I just don’t believe some things have to be real and that makes them not real.’”
“You received a letter addressed to a horse?” said Elise’s mother.
“I once received a letter addressed to Edith Gotswegon,” said Elise.
Her mother turned to her. Clearly the excitement was beginning to affect her. She said, “Not the beige one, but the one who joined the nuns?”
“The one who joined the nuns is more orange, and no, not her, the older one, who is prim and has hair like tree bark.”
“Well, how is she getting along?” asked Elise’s mother.
“It was not from her, Mother, it was written to her.”
Elise’s mother said it sounded to her like the post office was in worse shape than she’d heard. She said something about the Pony Express, but no one paid attention except Gus, who was even more passionate about the Pony Express than the Natchez Trace, though he knew better than to change the subject.
“Back to my point,” said Lorena. “Certain things cannot be made to be not real by pretending they aren’t real.”
“Your sister makes a good point,” said their mother, rejoining the party.
“Does she?” said Gus.
Until then, he was thought to have trailed off. Elise thought he was down by the river or off somewhere else contemplating the Pony Express. No one realized he was there. But he started talking.
“My mother died when I was very young. I remember nothing about her. My father never spoke of her. He moved away and left me with my aunt. On the night that I was to leave for Lone Wolf, my aunt sat me down and told me what she remembered about my mother. There wasn’t much. She loved me and my little brother, Leslie, who died of measles. She was smart. Also she had a habit of stopping in the middle of a walk, say, on the sidewalk of our small town and staring into a store window. Or across the street. She would stop for a long time and she would stare and then without a word she would continue along to wherever it was that she was going.
“What was she looking at? That is what I wanted my aunt to tell me. But I had no idea how to ask her or if it was okay to ask her. But I never stopped wondering. First I wanted to know, and then I needed to know. Finally I realized I would never know, that I could only pretend to know.
“Only by wondering what my mother was looking at, and by looking myself and pretending to see—because I will never know, we’ll never know—and only by looking where others directed me to look” (here Gus looked at Lorena and her mother, and then he turned to look long at Elise, saying in his silent way that the two of them had everything to lose and were all the better for it) “did I learn to live through my grief and loneliness.”
Then he sat back and was quiet.
“That is a lovely story,” said Lorena. “But knowing what your mother was looking at and having to pretend because you will never know is not quite the same thing as making something real by pretending it is not.”
Gus nodded at Lorena. “You might be right. But here is one thing I know. I came west to be a teacher only to learn that I knew next to nothing. I knew how to memorize things, but I did not know what anything meant. I was raised by a wonderful woman, my aunt Mattie, but we never talked of the sorts of things we are talking about now. For instance, how one ought to go about living one’s life. So everything I know? I learned it from all of you. And I am grateful.”
Elise was pretending to have the sniffles, even though she did not care to pretend. Why could she not just cry? She would not look at Lorena, not after the way she had dismissed Gus’s story—which was more than Elise had ever heard him say about his mother in the twenty years she’d known him—as irrelevant.
“I would have loved to have known your mother, Gus,” said Elise’s mother, “though I feel that I know her now through you. I will keep her with me in my house, and I’ll pull the curtains tightly to.”
She smiled at her daughters and said, “I have had enough excitement for a while. Gus, will you see me across the yard?”
Gus came around and helped her out of her chair, but before she took a step she leaned toward Lorena
and kissed her forehead.
“Your father was a flawed man and there is no denying or excusing his laziness. But he did love you. He admired you. He said often, before you left and right up until he took sick and died, ‘Lorena has more gumption than anyone I have ever met, man or woman.’”
Lorena said, “I will be over in a while to visit, Mother,” and her mother leaned over and kissed her again and said, “Do.”
A cloud came along and blocked out the sun. The sky sealed shut, the blanket tightly pinned.
In the dark kitchen, Lorena said, “I don’t know what kind of husband he has been to you, or whether or not he has hit a lick at a snake, but he loves you. You two deserve each other.”
Usually when people said “You two deserve each other,” it was meant to be mean, but Lorena, Elise decided, did not intend it as such. Yet there was a hint of spite in it still. Elise heard it, and she knew there would always be. She could understand why Lorena might find Gus’s tribute to his mother’s habit of stopping and staring off into the distance not, personally, all that moving. In fact, seeing it from Lorena’s point of view, which she was just now able to do, it seemed inconsiderate for Gus to tell that story. Like a lot of things, it was both inconsiderate and honest.
“Thank you,’ said Elise. “Also, I’m sorry.”
Lorena shrugged, uncharacteristically. She had never been a shrugger.
“He meant what he said about being grateful to you,” Elise said.
“I’m sure he did, in his way.”
We all have our ways and only our ways is what Elise wanted to say, but instead she said, “Is it best if we never speak of him again? Because that is going to be difficult.”
“I don’t know what’s best.”
“You always have.”
“No, Elise. I am not who you would have me to be.”
Elise thought about the phrase “would have me to be.” It was the “have” that bothered her most, likely because it was true. She would have people, places, things—non-nouns, her husband liked to call them—be what they were, if only she knew how.
“Who are you, then?” said Elise, unable to ignore the voice that said, Why don’t you ask her? “Tell me, so I can know.”
Something in Lorena’s face shifted, like the way the light falls away from the mountain behind the cottage when the sun goes down. Dusk had come to her and Elise watched it and sang the buried songs to Lorena. Against the icy wind, Sandy struggled, but they were all safe and warm beneath the blanket of sky.
Prairie Fever Page 27
