by Laura McNeal
“Why now?” he asked.
Charlotte shrugged. “Two reasons, I’m guessing. First is what the doctors said about Neva. That she can’t survive Kansas, which is ironic, in my opinion, because who can survive Kansas? That’s what I’d like to know. Doctors ought to fill out all their prescription forms with the words Abandon Kansas and put an exclamation point on it.”
Charlotte watched the chickens searching for more corn but they had eaten it all.
She said, “Know what the doctor in Wichita told Mom? He said that he treated a man last week who couldn’t breathe right, and after the doctor pounded on his chest, the man coughed something up. Know what it was?”
“I don’t think I want to,” Clare said.
“Dirt. He had a big plug of it inside him. Like a cork, he said.” She shook her head.
Clare picked up a stone and chucked it toward a fence post. It missed. “Is that reason number one and number two?”
“No. The second reason is the storm. Dad trapped with Aldine like that.”
“So?” Clare wished he’d been the hero who’d staggered out through the wind and driven blind in the brownout and found himself unable to restart the car until the storm stopped; then for five whole hours Aldine would’ve been his and his alone.
Charlotte pulled her coat tighter and fingered the place where she had very neatly darned a moth hole. “People talk,” she said. “And the coal she burned up was the school’s, not hers to use as she pleased. That’s why they’ve closed the school. That and the lack of funds. I heard about it from Emmeline.”
Clare slowly ran his tongue across his gritty teeth. “I’ll bet you did,” he said.
After a while Charlotte said, “You’re supposed to kill Goosey for dinner.”
“Goosey is a layer.”
“We can’t take a layer to California, can we?”
Clare didn’t mind shooting squirrels or rabbits, but he hated butchering chickens. “All she’s good for is boiling,” he said, but not very loud. He wondered what would happen to Aldine if they all moved to California. They could take her along, maybe. More likely she’d go back to her sister in New York, maybe all the way back home to Air, Scotland, where there was a river called Dune. He wished he could go such places. When he pulled the ax out of the chopping block, Goosey went on pecking at the ground, her naked pink back a record of troubles with roosters now dead.
“Bryan O’Linn had no hat to his head,” Clare sang to her, and she shied a bit.
“He thought that the pot would do him instead,
Then he murdered a cod for the sake of its fin,
‘Whoo, as good as a feather,’ says Bryan O’Linn.”
He fingered the dust in his pocket. He sank the ax in the block, scaring Goosey enough to make her half fly clumsily toward the front porch. The wind was starting to pick up, and he crouched down on the dirt to keep warm, thinking that he would go through the presidents and vice presidents once before he caught her.
42
I wrote to Ida this afternoon,” Mrs. Price told Aldine at supper, her face rosier than Aldine had ever seen it. “That’s my sister,” Mrs. Price added, though Aldine already knew who Ida was: the one in the photograph on the marble side table who looked like a well-fed, cheerful, darker-haired Ellie Price. Aldine knew, too, that the family was leaving, probably to California. Charlotte had told her, barely able to suppress the gladness in her voice. She and her mother had won. Ansel had lost.
“She lives in Fallbrook, California,” Mrs. Price was saying. “Lemons grow there and I don’t know what all.” Mrs. Price pointed to the wooden box she kept papers in, a crate decorated on one side with a peeling dark blue picture of oversized lemons and white flowers. Lofty Lemons, it said. Fallbrook, California. The box had always been there, but Aldine had never known that it came from someone they knew.
“Do you think they have Silver Shred there?” she asked. As she looked at the bright yellow lemons, impossibly round and large, she longed for a spoonful.
“Silver what?”
“I guess you’d call it lemon jam. It’s marmalade.”
Ellie shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it. Ida sent those lemons a long time ago, but she never sent jam. She does accounts at the packinghouse.”
“I wrote to my sister, too, in New York City. I suppose Mr. Price told you.”
She saw from Mrs. Price’s face that Ansel hadn’t told her, a fact that for some reason pleased her. She’d told Ansel that she asked her sister for a loan of enough money to buy a train ticket back to New York. She’d also made it clear that she still expected to be paid by the school board and she was sorry when Ansel had said, “That’s only right,” and “Fair is fair,” but gave her nothing by way of timetable for when such payment might be forthcoming.
“Leenie would’ve had her bairn by now and I’m dying to see it,” she said, looking only at Mrs. Price while she spoke, not at Charlotte, though what she really felt was Ansel’s presence across the table, his dark hair and his arms, the sleeves of his work shirt rolled up to the elbow.
A silence began to set in.
“Did you know there’s a storm on Jupiter that’s been blowing for two hundred and sixty-eight years?” Charlotte asked no one in particular.
No one answered, so Aldine out of courtesy said, no, she couldn’t imagine it. She still expected, when she looked out the window, to see dust billowing up like a brown, vaporous sea that would bury them as the volcano buried Pompeii.
“At least our storm didn’t last that long,” Charlotte said. Her tone was benign but not sincerely so. She just wanted to bring the topic round to what happened at the schoolhouse, wanted everyone to have to think of it again, but Ansel deflected her.
“No, Lottie, it didn’t last that long,” he said, and then remarked that he’d been asking around to see if he could rent out the farm. The Tanner, Osborne, and Heapson places had all been sold at auction for a tenth of their worth, he said, so he wouldn’t get anything for his property, or for his equipment, either.
“Rent to who?” Ellie asked. “You can’t rent something that blows out from under you.” Her forehead seemed unusually high and stark because she’d tied a navy-blue scarf tightly over her hair. Just looking at the scarf made Aldine’s scalp itch because she did the same thing when she didn’t have time to wash her hair.
“I heard a tenant might be moving onto the Tanner place,” Clare said.
Ansel took a forkful of boiled chicken and pushed it across the gravy on his plate. His serving, like Aldine’s and everyone else’s, had been a meager pile in the center of the plate. Aldine thought he must be ravenous, being twice her size. She was hungry every night now.
“Opa’s sent a draft,” Ellie said. “I have only to go to the bank with it.”
Ansel didn’t look up but his fist stiffened on the fork. Clare had once told Aldine that, for a wedding gift, Herr Hoffman had given Ellie a silver serving spoon engraved with her first name instead of her newly acquired initial. Aldine pressed her lips together and took a drink of silty water.
“Did you hear about the Stuyvesants?” Charlotte asked. She had finished her stew and was pressing the fork down in the gravy, then licking it. It was what they all did.
Mrs. Price gave Charlotte a warning look. “Now is not the time, Lottie.”
“What?” Neva asked, her big eyes glossy with fever, her mouth ajar so that you could see a pair of oversize teeth pushing their crooked way from her gums. “What happened to the Stuyvesants?”
“Nothing,” Mrs. Price said. “Can you eat another dumpling, Neva? Please? Look, I cut it into little pieces for you.”
“Tell me first,” Neva said, regarding the dumpling.
Mrs. Price shook her head. “Absolutely not,” she said.
Neva looked pleadingly at Aldine, who shrugged and smiled and said, “Listen to your mother now.”
Charlotte had already told Aldine in morbid detail how five members of the Stuyvesant family, who lived
on a farm not ten miles away, had died of ptomaine poisoning from eating apricots canned without sugar. For the first day they were just fine, she said, and they went about their business, but then they developed double vision. The four-year-old, the eleven-year-old, an uncle, a sister-in-law, and the mother had died, in that order.
On the table, as usual, was a jar of home-canned fruit. Aldine had been hoping they were peaches, and that they would be dessert. Now that Mrs. Price had opened them, she saw that they were small like apricots.
“Should we be eating those?” Charlotte asked.
“They’re perfectly good,” Mrs. Price said. “I put in lots of sugar.” With the engraved silver spoon, which was so large that syrup splashed on the tablecloth, she dished out two slippery, menacing globes for each person. When she came to the last plate, which was Neva’s, she hesitated. She put the jar down and went into the kitchen, returning with a smaller jar of peach pit jelly and a heel of bread.
“Not pit jelly,” Neva cried. “I want apricots!”
“No,” Mrs. Price said. “When you’re sick, you can’t bear up as well. You can’t take chances.”
“What chances? I want apricots like everyone else!”
“You can have them in California.”
It was all so hopeless. The family was going to California, to the town where lemons grew, and Aldine wouldn’t have a place to live. She didn’t want to eat the apricots, but Mrs. Price stuck her fork in the center of an apricot’s round back and sliced. Then she ate a piece. Ansel didn’t bother to cut his, but simply moved the orb from plate to mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Flavorsome or I’m a fool. What’s the matter with you all?”
Aldine cut her apricots into small pieces and ate each piece in the faith that if she died, he would die, too, a strange and silly thought that shamed her. Everything she could see in the next room—the petit-point rug, the cherrywood secretary, Herr Hoffman’s photograph, Mrs. Price’s radio, Tiffany lamp, and marble-topped occasional table—all had a fragile, abandoned look about them, as if they were the furnishings of a ship that was tipping and taking on water. She remembered how she had stood in that exact spot one September day, bangles clacking, feeling Neva’s little fingers pulling her forward. It seemed a long time ago.
43
Charlotte had told Clare the story about the Stuyvesants while he was washing up for supper, but apricots were his favorite, and he didn’t want her to think she’d scared him so he ate them. They tasted all right. But now, in bed, he felt something besides the usual hunger. It was a kind of dizzy fog. He wondered if it wasn’t the first sign of ptomaine poisoning. Probably it wasn’t but possibly it was. This possibility kept him awake, and when he was awake, he thought of Aldine. He imagined tiptoeing up the stairs, standing at the foot of her bed, and staring at her as she slept. He thought of this all the time. He could never think what he might say if she woke up, but what he wanted to say was something that would turn her into one of those women in photographs who smiled mischievously above naked, round breasts.
He’d never tiptoed upstairs. Always before, he’d thought she’d still be here a week or month from now and now everyone was leaving before anything could happen.
He folded back his blankets, stood up, and tested his stocking feet on the wooden floor. He began to walk. The stairs to the attic didn’t creak beneath his weight, at least not until the top one when it was too late to go back. He stood very still and listened for wind. It was not blowing tonight.
When he pushed open the door and stood within it, the room was much as he imagined it, only more beautiful, for moonlight slanted through the window and washed across the iron bed in the center of the tiny room, the figure under the blanket, the dark hair on the pillow. She was turned away from Clare, but she turned suddenly at his approach, as if she’d been awake all along.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What are you doing here?” she said, but without real alarm. She kept her voice low, too.
“I can’t sleep,” he said.
She was staring at him through the dimness. She did not seem afraid.
“I thought maybe—” He was listening to his voice, wondering what he would say next. “I thought maybe you could do like you do for Neva. Sing that song about Bryan O’Linn.”
“What?” She sat up and held the blanket over her upper half. She slept in something with long sleeves. She would, given the cold.
“Bryan O’Linn, his wife, and wife’s mother,” Clare whispered, too embarrassed to sing the lyric, “were all going over the bridge together.”
Aldine watched him.
“I can’t remember the next part,” he whispered. This was a bald lie and he supposed she knew it.
“You have to go out of here,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve had enough trouble.”
“Please,” he said. “Just sing it to me. Then I’ll go back down.”
Aldine was quiet. Her face was pale in the moonlight, and her fingers clutched the blanket. “Come here then,” she whispered and when he’d sat down, she sang in the smallest, purest voice.
“Bryan O’Linn, his wife, and wife’s mother
Were all going over the bridge together,
The bridge it broke up and they all tumbled in,
‘We’ll go home by water,’ says Bryan O’Linn.”
Her voice made him feel dizzier. He found himself wondering whether her nightgown went all the way down to her feet, or only to her knees. He shivered. “It’s so cold up here,” he said. “I could bring you an extra blanket.”
“Go back doonstairs,” she whispered. “Clarence, you must.”
Clay-dance. That was how his ear would always receive it.
“Don’t make me go,” he said. The quilt she had on the bed was made from Opa’s old suits. He touched the end that was nearest him and whispered that when he was little, he’d pretended each rectangle was a field and the far edge was the track for his train of stones. “See?” he said, pointing to a herringbone patch. “This here’s wheat.” He pointed to a mustard-colored patch near her thigh. “This one’s corn.” He slowly moved his finger to the black patch that was lying like a hill on her foot. “And this,” he said, “has just been plowed for a kitchen garden.” He left his hand there. She didn’t speak but retracted her foot.
“Aldine is a beautiful name,” he whispered.
She said nothing. He had repeated the name to himself many times, alone and in private. This was the first time he’d said it in her presence.
“Aldine,” he whispered. “I just wanted to tell you, before we leave—” He stopped. Her eyes looked enormous and black. “If we die, for example, I would want you to know.”
“Know what?” Aldine asked, her voice even quieter than his. Clare realized that his breath was visible in the moonlight and his hands were freezing.
“When you sing,” he whispered, “I fall in love with you.”
Aldine watched him. He wanted to move closer, to be near her face, but she didn’t move, and he felt immobilized, his hands still touching the wool of the blanket.
“I could taste the sugar, couldn’t you?” she whispered. “And there was no mold on top. They said Mrs. Stuyvesant scraped mold off the top.”
“Yes,” he said. “I could taste it.”
“The mold?” She pronounced it “moold.”
“No. Sugar. I could taste the sugar.”
It was quiet. He wondered how you made a woman want you back. He did nothing except go on feeling his own suppressed, pathetic wanting, and after several more silent moments, she said he should go back to bed. He supposed he should feel upright and gallant for standing up and saying good-bye but all he felt was humiliation.
44
The next day, Ansel sold the last cows and brought back from town a letter for Aldine. That was fast, was his first thought upon seeing the envelope, but he saw at once that something was wrong. Aldine sister’s name was on it—Mrs. Wm. Coope
r—but the return address was in Salt Lake City, which didn’t make sense. Aldine said her sister lived in New York. There had been nothing at the post office from the superintendent’s office, which was an aggravation. Why couldn’t they send the girl the money she earned, or at least tell her when they would?
“A letter for Miss McKenna,” he called into the house from the mud porch when he arrived home.
Ellie appeared from the kitchen wiping her hands in her apron. She’d been packing, he knew, and her hair was limp, oily, disheveled. “She’s gone to Newton with Sonia Odekirk.”
He waited.
“They were going to have lunch at Woolworth’s.”
“Good for her then,” he said, and he meant it.
Ellie’s expression was stony. “At least someone will have a good meal and a pleasant day.” Then, with a rigid set to her chin: “Sonia might’ve asked Lottie, too.”
“Lottie’s seen Newton. The girl never has.”
Ellie gave her head an impatient shake, her way of saying, Nonsense. “The truth is, the girl could’ve helped for once.” She looked at her hands, inky from packing plates in newspaper. Then, looking tiredly at Ansel: “What did you get for the cows?”
He looked down. “Less even than I feared.” A lie. He’d gotten exactly what he’d feared, and then slipped half of it into a hidden niche of his wallet. So he told a lie he could never have told if they were staying on—Ellie would’ve ferreted out the truth or stumbled onto it, one or the other—but they weren’t staying on. They were leaving the home place.
Ellie nodded without expression, and why would it be otherwise—she expected nothing from him or his cows or his farm. Her gaze shifted to the letter he held at his side. She extended her hand to take it from him, and he was surprised by his instantaneous impulse not to give it up, but he did. She looked down at it and said, “Money, let’s hope.”
In a low voice he said, “She deserves it, God knows.”
Ellie studied him, saying nothing, until his gaze slid away. When he looked again, she’d turned and set the letter on the center table, where Aldine would see it. From the kitchen he could hear the clink of dishes and a low desultory exchange between Lottie and Ellie.