Finally Lorena said, “What a ridiculous question.”
What part of it was ridiculous? Who are you? Or the fact that Elise could, after all that happened, after time dropped from the sky, ever know her sister again? Maybe the ridiculous part of it all was the notion that knowing, instead of pretending, could change what happened.
All this made Elise’s head hurt. She squeezed her eyes shut. The words she sang to Lorena were drowned out by a coyote wind, lost forever in the blowing snow.
“Are you okay?” said Lorena.
Elise opened her eyes. They were sitting in the kitchen of her lovely cabin. The sun had found its favorite square of floorboard. There it basked. Lorena was there. She had come to visit their mother. Certain questions were ridiculous to her. Certain questions are just ridiculous, period.
“I would like to hear more about your husband,” said Elise, and this was true, mostly.
“His middle name is Newton.”
“Isaac Newton Nelson,” said Elise. “Is he very scientific?”
“He is very precise. Sometimes people he has just been introduced to make the mistake of calling him Ike. He is too precise for nicknames, especially when delivered by strangers, so he corrects them by saying ‘I was given the name Isaac and for now I choose to keep it that way, but if things change I will let you know.’”
“That makes me like him. I would not like it if someone I did not know called me El.”
“Nor would I like it if someone called me Lo.”
“Do you have a photograph?”
“In my bag. I can tell you that he is dashing in a chiseled way.”
“Has he a prominent jawbone?”
“It appears to have been sculpted by the wind.”
“Does the wind blow there?”
“You would not believe it. Also, not a tree in sight.”
“You must feel just a little bit at home?”
“I feel like I have no real home. Sometimes I feel like I would like to move with the children to Chicago. Sometimes it seems the logical end point for a simple prairie girl.”
“Which you are not. Simple, I mean.”
“I wonder if Blaguna is in Chicago,” said Lorena. “I have not thought of her in years.”
We can ask Sandy, Elise thought but did not say.
“You can stay as long as you like,” said Elise.
“It is pleasant here,” said Lorena. “I like that it is above zero. Of course I must return to Wyoming with the children. I am no more going to Chicago to look up Blaguna than Edith Gotswegon has married into Oklahoma City society. But we just got here and it is pleasant. The sun makes me want to take off all my clothes and stretch across a boulder by your lovely creek. That sounds like something you would do.”
Elise said, “It is something I do whenever the weather and my schedule allow for it.”
“Maybe you can distract my children while I expose myself to the elements.”
“Of course.”
“Might I stay while you take your trip?”
“I wish you would come along.”
“I don’t think we’d all fit in Gus’s Jeep,” said Lorena.
“Gus wants to see the Library of Congress, but that does not interest me in the least.”
“Nor me. I do not see the point in traveling hundreds of miles to see rows of books on shelves. While he is wasting his time there, you and I can take the children to the Smithsonian Institute.”
“And to see the oversize seated Lincoln.”
“I would like to see the cherry trees,” said Lorena.
“I am leery of the trees,” said Elise.
“Why?”
“I feel that they might suffocate me.”
“It would be a good way to go, though,” said Lorena.
“There are far worse,” said Elise.
“We have read about them in the Kiowa County News.”
“Sherman shot by Ivent.”
“Sherman would have cut Ivent with a knife,” said Lorena.
“Self-defense,” said Elise. “But the both of them were dastardly.”
“It’s true.”
They were quiet. Twenty-odd years of silence hovered in the sun-drenched kitchen, settling in the patch of golden floorboard.
“Texas Woman Suffocated by Violently Beautiful Trees,” said Elise.
“On Trip to View Oversize Seated Lincoln.”
They might have continued trading headlines of their upcoming trip together had the children not come spilling through the door. The junior Isaac held a rock in his hand.
“The boy has discovered an arrowhead,” said Elise.
“Let me see,” said Lorena. Her children gathered close to her, watching her as she held it in her hand, weighing it, then pronounced it, after much scrutiny, to be authentic.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many of the quotes from newspapers in this novel came directly from newspapers of western Oklahoma and west Texas between 1900 and 1920. In some places the details of actual events and incidents referred to have been altered to fit the needs of the story.
My thanks to Joy Harris, Terry Kennedy, Nancy Vacc and family, the University of North Carolina of Greensboro for a research leave during which much of this book was written, the Jentel Arts Foundation for a place to write and run in Wyoming, sweet Adobe Chi for space and quiet and wild west Texas storms. Special thanks to Laura Furman for reading an early draft of this novel and offering sage counsel, and to my editor, Kathy Pories, for once again taking some pages and making them into a book. Extra special thanks to Jude Grant for fixing my arithmetic.
And, hey, Maud Casey? Thank you for everything—then, since, tomorrow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Parker is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, Runner’s World, Men’s Journal, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. He is the Nicholas and Nancy Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He lives in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2019 by Michael Parker.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029369
eISBN: 978-1-61620-945-2
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