by Laura McNeal
Will shook his head. “Your aunt wouldn’t forgive me,” he said. He began smoothing his small measure of jelly onto his toast. “It’s out of the question.”
“I’ve already bought it,” she said.
Leenie didn’t like this, and gave Will a worried look before she said, “How do you have the money, Deen?”
“Dr. O’Malley,” Aldine said carefully, “gave me a big raise after you left.”
“You never said a thing before!”
“How do you think I got here?” Aldine said irritably.
Leenie shrugged. “Sedge, of course.”
“No,” Aldine said. “She didn’t have it. Not after she paid for yours.”
Leenie was kind enough to look guilty. “How much do you have?” she asked.
Aldine didn’t want to tell her. If it wasn’t more than she deserved, it was more than she deserved from a doctor whose accounts she’d kept for three years.
“I lost nearly all of it in the exchange rate.”
“But how much?”
She had come this far. “I started with a thousand pounds.”
The silence in the room expressed their astonishment. She spun her bracelets under the table, the smooth rings warm against her wrist.
“A thousand?” Leenie said. Will didn’t speak, but the way he looked at her made her feel she’d been selfish in some way.
“It cost three hundred quid to buy a third-class bunk. And as you know, a pound is worth very little here.”
“But you still had enough to buy a train ticket?”
“Yes. I’ve not touched it since I started working.”
“I can’t believe you want to leave me,” Leenie said.
“I don’t want to leave you. I need to find my own way, Leenie.” She gave her sister a heartfelt look, wishing she could explain that she thought it would be nearby, no farther than Edinburgh was from Ayr. “I do.”
The table fell silent then and remained silent until at last in a small voice, Leenie said, “When would you go then?”
Dr. O’Malley had wanted to look at her without her clothes on. He had said, in his reasonable voice, that it would be like the statue of Venus de Milo, like nudes in a painting. For perhaps the last time in his life, he would see beauty. She could give him that small gift, couldn’t she? He wouldn’t touch her. It was not a sin to be beautiful, or to be looked upon as a thing of beauty. He had explained it very well, and she had been sorry for him, to be what he was: old and alone, sick with some kind of cancer.
So in his sitting room with the high ceiling like a church, with the heavy velvet drapes and the small panes of icy glass through which light became more wistful, she had at last unbuttoned her dress and let it fall, removing then her slip, her brassiere, her garter belt, her stockings, and finally her drawers. She had not known what to do then, so she asked.
“What now?”
He said, “Nothing, just let me look at you a while,” and that was what he did, his eyes lowered, his hands clasped. His admiration made her shivery-sick and she was careful not to look down, not to see what he saw. He cleared his throat.
“What?”
“Perhaps you would sing the Mendelssohn.”
She closed her eyes, remembering the words. It seemed to her deeply irreverent, but she found having something to do diverting. She started in almost a murmur but her voice settled into itself. She no longer trembled as she stood, and only felt awkward again when she fell quiet and began putting everything back on, each step all fingers and thumbs because he was watching her and saying, “Shame to cover that. And that. And that.” She felt naked inside her clothes walking back to Aunt Sedge’s house. She wrote him a letter that night resigning her position as his secretary.
A day or two later he sent £1000 to her by messenger. Ten notes, one hundred quid each, new-looking and sharp, unsoiled. It was a startling sum, so immense that for a while she regarded the packet as though it were a genie’s lamp. He had enclosed a brochure for the TSS Transylvania, a steamship of the Anchor Line. It departed, like the Caledonia, from Glasgow.
Go and be happy, he wrote. As you have made me.
Under the hard-bottomed davenport in Leenie’s flat, in a suitcase, she kept the brochure for the Transylvania, which in turn held Dr. O’Malley’s money and his note. When Leenie and Will had gone to bed, she quietly slid the case out and read the note again. Go and be happy. What remained of the money was £700 6s. 3d. Less than $200 once she handed it across the counter at the bureau of exchange. It might be enough for the train ticket to Kansas, she thought, if she added her wages to it. It would have to be.
9
Two days and nights Aldine sat on the train and stared at fields through her own reflection, and saw no water to speak of. She carried three blood-spotted handkerchiefs in her pocketbook when she stepped off the train in Dorland, touching the last one to her nose and wishing for a river to make everything wet and cool, as it had been in her imagination. But she saw no lochs, no rivers, not even a burn. She had to settle for a station bog where water trickled into a rust-bloomed sink near a ghastly commode. When she’d combed her dusty hair, washed her face without soap, and checked the chapped edges of her nose for blood, she changed her dress to the black one printed all over with shells and pinned once more to her hair the tan beret just like the one in Vogue that she’d knitted in Leenie’s flat. Her skin looked ashy white against the rouge she rubbed into her lips.
None of this quite killed the pleasure of the letter of acceptance in her purse that said she was just what they were looking for. That was it exactly—just what we are looking for—and written in such a fine hand it might have come from a hotel menu. Yours sincerely, Ansel Price. She took the letter out and held it while she waited for this very man to appear and fetch her.
Dorland, Kansas, appeared to consist of plain pastel houses in a row, each one small and lonesome in its own dry yard, and a huge white building made of columns that looked like stone tubes. FARMER’S CO-OP, it said in painted black letters near the top. Beyond the lane where she stood, which was called Spruce Street, she could see leafy trees, bits of red brick buildings, and a gray structure that had an impressively tall hedge along one side. The street in front of those buildings was so straight she could see all the way to the end, and it wasn’t a very long way before the trees and buildings stopped and the yellowish countryside began again. She wanted to walk into town and see if there was a hotel or pub where she could get something to drink, but she was afraid to leave the vicinity of the platform.
Minutes passed, and she ventured off the platform to the road, which was unpaved. She felt the sun heating her bare arms—scorching them, most likely—but the air felt clean and good after so many hours in the stuffy train. She walked, little stones rolling under her shoes, to the end of the block that contained the platform, then turned back. No one came, not by foot or by car. A bug leaped away from her foot, his body the color of dust. Another popped out every time she moved, so she bent down, curious, and saw one hiding in a clump of weeds: just a grasshopper like those at home but striped in alien colors, gold and black, with a big reptilian eye. She straightened up with a feeling that was part exhilaration, part unease. The road went on being empty, so finally she asked the man in the ticket booth if Mr. Ansel Price had already come to the station and left.
The man cocked his head. “Ansel Price, do you mean?” and when she nodded, the man said, “Nope. Haven’t seen Ansel at all today.”
She strode back into the glaring sun. What a disaster if she’d gotten it all wrong somehow. The man knew Ansel Price, so it was not the wrong town. Maybe he’d had car trouble. She was telling herself it would just be another minute when the man from the ticket booth came out and said, “You family of the Prices?”
Aldine shook her head and hid the blood-spotted handkerchief in her fist. “I came out to be the new teacher,” she said.
“What?” he said, as if she were speaking Chinese.
She sai
d it again, more slowly.
He seemed not only uncertain of her meaning, but irritated that he was made to feel uncertain. “Which school?” he asked.
“I think it’s called Stony Bank.”
“Stuny Bonk?” he said, echoing her.
“Stony,” she repeated. “Stony Bank.”
He still looked baffled. “Well, Mr. Tanner lives near the Prices,” he said, gesturing toward a round bearded man reading something in front of the post office. “He’ll take you if you want to go with him.”
She did, she supposed. She certainly couldn’t stay here.
“Thank you,” she said, and the ticket booth man nodded and said she was lucky it was Saturday; folks come to town on Saturday.
Aldine thought she could not have understood him; other than themselves and the man across the street, there was not a soul to be seen. She said so, and he said what sounded like, “Cinema.”
“What?”
“Might be they’re all at the matinee,” he said, and he introduced her to Mr. Tanner, who had not a car but a wagon with a team of black mules. She wondered in a hungry, hopeless way how far it was and climbed up beside him. She sat with folded hands already gritty from touching the wagon. Without even entering the shady town, they headed for the place in the distance that seemed exactly like the place they were, and she watched the furrows spoke by, one long row fanning slowly into another, until it began to seem that there was nothing else left in the world but hoof plods, furrows, creaking wheels, and the sweat glistening on the rumps of the animals made to pull them.
Mr. Tanner had not spoken, nor did he look at her. Occasionally he made a clucking sound and said something to the mules—“Edna, Edna,” it seemed to her—but otherwise he stared straight forward, almost as if the world had lost interest for him.
In front of them one of the mules shat casually. This, too, passed without laugh or joke or comment. It was too much. She had to speak.
“Where’s the wheat?” she asked, not that she knew a thing about wheat. A salesman on the train had talked to her of wheat prices and thousands of new-tilled acres until his voice was just a drone. But the fields around her seemed nothing but dirt.
“Not up yet,” Mr. Tanner said, and allowed himself a dull review of the landscape before staring forward again. “It’s seeding time.”
Her skin felt so dusty and the air was so dry that she wondered if dust covered the pupils that let her gaze out of her dusty head. Finally they passed a farmhouse. After a long time, another. She had seen many of the same kind from the train and could not get used to how frail and far apart they were. At home and in New York, the houses were made of stone. These were just wood.
She almost started when Mr. Tanner said, “I suppose it isn’t what you expected.”
When she turned, she saw that he had been following her gaze out to the countryside, and something in her went out to him then, this round man with his frayed cuffs and tattered boots, so she said, “I’ll wager it has its own beauty, doesn’t it, though—once you have the feel for it?”
A small rough laugh broke from behind his beard, but at what she wouldn’t know, for he said nothing. After a while, he clucked and again said, “Edna, Edna.”
“Who’s Edna?”
Mr. Tanner seemed startled. “What’s that now?”
She slowed down her voice. “Who is Edna?” she asked, and when this seemed only to boost his confusion, she said, “Is one of the beasts named Edna?”
The man’s expression relaxed. “Oh,” he said. “You thought I was saying Edna, but I wasn’t. I was saying, ‘Ed now.’ That’s the old fella on the left. The other one is Billy.” A second or two passed. “You cannot beat a good mule.” Another pause. “Their legs are all the same length, I think that’s the main thing. So they ride smooth. Plus, they’re smarter than horses.” He allowed himself a glance at Aldine. “Both Ed and Billy can open a horse gate. They just have to see you do it twice and that’s it.”
After a few more fields passed by, Mr. Tanner said abruptly, “Another example is that a horse will just kick at you anywhere but a mule will wait and plan and aim above the waist, that’s how smart they are.” He was nodding to himself now. “These two mules here, I wouldn’t trade them for six horses, or for love or money neither.” The vehemence of this proclamation surprised her, so she let a little time pass before venturing with, “And when you say, ‘Ed now,’ what do you mean by it?”
“Say again?” he said, and she did and this time he understood her.
“Oh. Ed will drift left. He’s blind in the right so he wants to drift left and Billy’s been with him so long she just lets him do it.”
That Billy was a girl was a small revelation Aldine decided not to pursue.
Minutes passed, a good many of them, it seemed to Aldine as she stared off, and then when she turned around, Mr. Tanner was regarding her.
“What did you say your name was?” he asked.
She said it and he repeated it so badly that she said it again and though he again gave it rough treatment, she nodded and said, “Yes, that’s it. Aldine McKenna.”
A long creaking minute passed. Then Mr. Tanner said, “And where’re you from?”
“Scotland.”
He made a sound like it stumped him, and then, to her surprise, he asked, “What’s that like?”
“Wet,” she said. “Burns wherever you look.” She closed her eyes briefly to pretend she was there, moving slowly among dark green sheltering trees. When she opened her eyes, she caught him looking at her again. It seemed an odd look, neither friendly nor admiring.
“Burns,” he said. “Wet burns.”
“Aye.”
More silence.
She said, “Will ye have children at the school then?”
He looked forward at the sweating mules and went on looking for so long that she wondered if he heard the question. Or perhaps it was her accent. Maybe, she thought, people in Kansas—including the children she taught—wouldn’t understand a word she said.
“No,” he said. “Not anymore. We have the one boy and he’s done with school.”
When he went no further, she said, “All grown then?”
“Yes,” he said. “All done growing.”
He fell silent then, and the wheels jounced and turned and she had nearly fallen into a doze when Mr. Tanner’s voice, as if from some distance, said, “That’ll be the Price place.”
And so she saw it for the first time: the far-off tree in bright yellow leaf, the tall white house, the huge gray barn that you could tell, as you got closer, had once been red. The land surrounding was flat and dry, chunky and hard brown on the furrow tops and only barely darker in the crevices.
“The school?” she asked.
“That way,” Mr. Tanner said, and pointed, but she couldn’t see anything.
10
Aldine expected to climb down from the wagon when Mr. Tanner drew the mules to a stop near the yard gate, but Mr. Tanner just sat, so she sat, too. A sloshing, motor-spinning sound came from the back of the house, and Aldine guessed she’d arrived while someone was washing clothes.
“You in there, Ellie?” Mr. Tanner called out. “You got a visitor!”
After a moment or two, a woman in a blue apron dress stepped onto the porch. Her hair was mouse-brown and oily, held up from her neck with pins. She hadn’t quite lost all of her looks. Her eyes were a pale blue, as if a stronger shade had been washed out of them, and they peered out with an expression that Aldine would later come to think of as suppressed disappointment. She shaded her eyes with her hand as Mr. Tanner said, “This is Alleen McCanna.”
“Aldine McKenna,” Aldine corrected, but her voice was a low rasp, and the woman on the porch looked at her as if she’d just made a gagging spasm and feared she might make one again. Even under the dowdy apron dress, the woman’s figure was statuesque, her breasts so prominent as to seem bovine. That Aldine was here, in this place, among these people, out of her own self-determin
ation, made her failure as an adult human being seem inarguable. She pressed her lips inward to keep from crying. Is this what had made her aunt choose the lonely house on Bellevue Crescent over life in Japan? The known world over this terrible conspicuous not-belonging?
“Alleen McCandless,” Mr. Tanner said again, this time a bit louder. “The new schoolteacher your husband hired.”
Mrs. Price looked at her with a confusion that had behind it a skeptical tint. “I didn’t know Ansel had hired anyone,” Mrs. Price said, and seemed to be studying Aldine. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Aldine still sat on the wagon under a beating sun. Mr. Tanner shifted and held the reins like he was anxious to turn his team around. The crazed sloshing, grinding noise kept on, hurling unseen clothes together in the drum on the back porch. An overgrown teenage girl, almost a woman, came strolling out the back door and reached down to rub her hands lovingly all over the head of the ribby black-faced dog that rose to her arrival and nosed her at every step. The girl was fleshier than Mrs. Price and unrestrained-looking, like a rampant hollyhock too big for the yard, and Aldine imagined the girl might be frolicsome with the boys, an idea that she would later reflect on because of its stark wrongness. When the greeting with the dog was finally done, she said, “So how’re Ed and Billy?”
Mr. Tanner nodded and said, “Good as ever.”
Then the girl looked at Aldine and said sunnily, “This your new hired hand, Mr. Tanner?”
The girl laughed at her own joke, though no one else did. In fact, Mr. Tanner didn’t seem even to regard it as one. “I’ve brought her here for you folks,” he said. “New teacher your father hired.”
The whole party sank back into silence, and Aldine felt like a package no one wanted to pay for. She sat stiffly, back straight, as if posture was the answer. Finally she cleared her throat. “I have a letter,” she said, and when she brought it out, she noticed that her hand trembled. “Did you not get mine then?”
Mrs. Price shielded her eyes again and reached up for the letter, studying first the envelope and then the contents. Aldine wanted a bath. She wanted dinner. She wanted to close her eyes and open them again on the rose-papered ceiling of the attic in Ayr, where she would hear Leenie’s muffled breathing beside her and know they had not left home.