Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  Her mother wrapped her in her grandfather’s greatcoat, or perhaps it was her great-grandfather’s coat? It was huge and itchy and Sandy did not care for it. “Leave before the sun drops behind the trees,” her mother would say, but she must have been thinking about Kansas, because in Lone Wolf there were no trees to speak of. To the east, south, and north was the ocean of prairie and just to the west ran the worn but noble Wichita Mountains, rising from miles of flatness as if discarded, like the detritus cast off by wagon trains of old. The Kiowa thought the mountains sacred, but Elise found them depressing and would prefer nature to speed up its course and wear them down to pebbles, so her view would be unencumbered by lumps of rock and dark brown dirt.

  “Sometimes when we arrive at Oklahoma we burn cow dung,” said Damyan one day in the abandoned sod house. His brothers shushed him. He was often caught staring out the window by Professor Smythe, who preceded Mr. McQueen. Elise would stare at him staring. His eyes, like hers, could see beyond the playing field, the stable, the outhouse. He was the only person she had ever heard say that barbed wire was a bad idea. She thought to ask her father about it, but if it wasn’t his idea, he wasn’t that interested.

  But Damyan did not like Mr. McQueen.

  “He is not much,” said Damyan that day in the sod house.

  “Not much what?”

  He shrugged and grabbed the paper, as if he could read it. She snatched it back.

  “I do not have time to teach you English, by the way.”

  “I speak English good.”

  “Perfect,” said Elise. “But back to Mr. McQueen. He is not much what?”

  “Something is in his belfry,” said Anton.

  “Well, I should hope so,” said Elise. “I would think they made sure of that before they hired him.”

  She learned from the Bulgarian brothers that none of the boys at school cared for Mr. McQueen. But none could say why. If only they had said why.

  That night, as always, she whispered to her sister in the dark. They had always slept in the same room with their brothers, and she and Lorena had shared a bed. After her brothers died, they got separate cots. Her mother insisted upon it. Elise was aware that her brothers had died of prairie fever so that she could whisper across the narrow space between the cots to her sister in the night. Their room was in the attic and mostly slanting, shadowy eave. They were so close that her sister heard her whispering and said, What? But it was so cold up there, with only thin board and shingle separating them from icy, snow-belching clouds, that her words froze sometimes before they bridged the gap. Having turned to ice, her sentence shattered into letters, and each letter tinkled like chimes onto the floorboard.

  “It has come to my attention that the boy half of the schoolhouse is not enamored of Mr. McQueen,” said Elise.

  “Which of your Bulgarians told you so?”

  “Damyan,” she said and then added, “also Anton.”

  “What else did they tell you?”

  “That when they first came to Lone Wolf they burned cow pies to stay warm.”

  “I am not, as you know, enamored of your Bulgarians, but you may have noticed that we burn coal? That is because there are so few trees in this place.”

  “Father might get the idea to plant some.”

  “You will need to plant the idea in his head.”

  It was a curious phrase, “plant an idea.” It suggested that ideas grew in the manner of, say, cotton. Her father’s ideas did not seem to reach maturity before he harvested them.

  “You are making fun of me,” said Elise.

  “I am making fun of Father,” said Lorena.

  “Do you care much for Mr. McQueen?”

  Lorena was silent for some seconds. Elise could hear the wind of her thoughts.

  “I feel that, like all of us, he has his limitations.”

  “Which are?”

  “The point of life is to know your limitations,” said Lorena.

  Elise thought about this. Her first thought was that Lorena’s recent tendency to state the point of life was irritating. Her second and subsequent thoughts concerned her own limitations. She was not attentive to the world around her if and when the world around her turned to dirty dishwater that her mother asked her to dump in the side yard. If the world sent her on an errand and the errand was as dull as dishwater, she came hard up against her limitations.

  My own limitations, A list. By Elise Stewart.

  1. My mind, I never feel it and it is like a fly not satisfied with any surface upon which it lights, and abuzz always.

  2. Mother-of-pearl will never be to me what they say it is, which is a lie.

  3. I would marry a Bulgarian, why not if I took a notion, and I would not care if the marriage qualified as “well” on Lorena’s grand scale.

  But she realized that her limitations were many and it would be daylight if she kept up the list. She attempted to sleep, but she shivered. Lorena felt her shivering and came and got into the cot with her. They were pinned inside, the blanket blocking out the wind and snow. She relaxed into her sister’s back. Sandy’s hooves in the surf. Now she could whisper. Her words would not ice up and break into chiming letters crashing against each other and then to the floor.

  “I don’t think I put much stock in pride,” said Elise.

  “Well, that is certainly a limitation.”

  “When people speak of it, it seems they mean very different things.”

  “The same could be said for the word ‘Sandy,’” Lorena said.

  “Sandy is a name, not a word.”

  “My point has been proven. Rather perfectly, by you.”

  Sometimes Lorena was a bully. Elise stayed awake as her sister slept like Charlie Carter, across three states. She stayed awake to mourn the loss of her own Beulah girl, only she did not know what her own Beulah girl was. Just that she had one.

  On those frigid nights when they slept crammed into a single saggy cot, Lorena’s bossy sleep-breath attempted to corral her. It tried to plant ideas in her mind.

  What if, Elise wondered in the night, she passed her sister on the street one day and her sister did not even see her?

  “You’ve not said why it is that the boys dislike Mr. McQueen.”

  “Why don’t you ask them?” said Lorena, which is what she always said when Elise asked a question she could only ask Lorena about someone else.

  The next morning the pump was frozen. Where was Father to start the fire in the stove? Her mother had to do it. Her mother often moved around the house with one arm crooked as if she were carrying her baby boy. Almost every woman in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, and likely also Axtell, Kansas, had lost a child, but her mother seemed to take it the hardest. Elise wondered if she did not have a touch of prairie fever herself. Would this not explain why she always told Elise to leave for home when the sun began to slip behind the trees?

  Prairie fever, I burn with it. It is the opposite for me of what it was for my poor dead brothers and my addled mother who carries around still her two baby boys in her arms. It is not death but life. I love the wind and the way it makes everything slap and creak and whistle. In the prairie dog villages, I know each hole and who lives there. I deliver their mail. I love the mounds where the Kiowa buried their dead. I can take you there, but you mustn’t climb them or the spirits of fierce warriors will follow you always from afar. You will always feel a shadow. Turn and look behind you all you want. You will not see them, they are too quick.

  “Hold still, Elise,” said her mother as she pinned the blanket in the barn. “If you don’t hold still, I will stick a pin in your sister.”

  “Please hold still,” said Lorena.

  Sandy set off in a trot. Lorena claimed to be the rider and Elise the passenger, but Sandy knew the way. In blinding snow and sideways wind, Sandy could feel the way.

  “Wade Vineyard and Carnie Bickerstaff were at Hobart,” said Elise.

  “They deserve each other.”

  “Should they marry, she would b
e Carnie Vineyard.”

  “An ever-so-slight improvement.”

  “Will you ever not be able to see me on the street?” she whispered to Lorena, but the heavy blanket muffled her words, and Lorena said, “Stop grunting, please.”

  “For rent: two-room house, second door west of schoolhouse.”

  “One room for me and one for you,” said Lorena.

  “Mother can come,” said Elise. She decided her sister disliked all men. She put her to the test.

  “When Charlie Carter woke and cried out for his Beulah girl, did you think that was funny or sad?”

  “I wasn’t even there. And neither were you.”

  All the proof she needed.

  “Elise,” said Lorena.

  Elise was all ears and only ears.

  “Please try to answer the questions put forth to you by others,” said Lorena. “Not everyone cares about what is in the newspaper.”

  “But you do.”

  “The Sunday school at Bethel purchased an organ through Professor R. C. Adams.”

  Elise smiled. Her smile warmed her sister’s back. It was a kiss on her neck. Sandy felt it and air escaped through his nostrils, a snort of delight.

  “But, Elise?” said Lorena.

  “Mr. McQueen never said the name of his horse,” said Elise. She waited for her sister to say, Why don’t you ask him? But Lorena did not. Straightaway, as soon as Mr. McQueen emerged in his fur-lined cap to unpin the blanket, his East Coast face flushed by the icy wind of the prairie, snow in his eyebrows, revealing what he might look like when old and gray, Elise said, “Why, Mr. McQueen, good morning!”

  Her sister did not have to groan. Their bodies had been touching all night and then the four miles to school.

  “Why, good morning yourself, Elise. What news is there from that fine instrument of journalism you favor?”

  Mr. McQueen took the paper too. Without it, he would freeze in his teacherage, his eyebrows white with snow. But he was indulging her and she knew it.

  She remembered Lorena’s plea.

  “There is not much,” she said, as Damyan said about Mr. McQueen.

  “That’s a pity. We should make something happen to get ourselves in the paper. What do you say about that, Lorena?”

  But Lorena had wrapped her scarf around her nose, exposing only her eyes, and ran inside the schoolhouse, leaving Elise in the stable with Mr. McQueen and Sandy.

  “She got up on the wrong side of the bed,” said Elise.

  “Some days, Elise, there is no right side.” The words seemed to slide out of his mouth and then he heard them. In his eyes was a desperate wish for the words to please come back.

  “Actually, I didn’t mean that. There is always a right side.”

  Elise could tell he was lying. One day soon she would say to Mr. McQueen, You need not lie. Perhaps this is why the boys didn’t like him, but she doubted it. Boys were fine with lies.

  “I shall stable Sandy. He can give me the times of low and high tide. Are they not called tide tables? It would please me if they were. You run along and warm yourself by the fire.”

  Inside, Lorena was talking to Edith Gotswegon. She’d never seen Lorena speak to Edith Gotswegon on purpose. What was this world?

  As Mr. McQueen went about the business of education, she observed him closely. He did not pick on the boys or favor the girls when he asked questions, and the boys immediately stuck their hand up before the question mark arrived, as if they knew everything. Damyan probably knew the answer, but he was busy thinking that barbed wire was not a good thing.

  Mr. McQueen did not make them wash the chalkboard as had Professor Smythe.

  He did not make anyone stand in the corner.

  He did not make a soul feel foolish or sorry for not getting their lessons up.

  “Any questions?”

  Elise raised her hand lazily as if she were trying to reach something on the top shelf of the pantry, standing on tiptoes. He called her name. Lorena looked across the room at her and then down at her desk.

  “What is the name of your horse, Mr. McQueen?”

  He had written the multiplication tables on the board and was pointing to them from a distance of however long the pointer was. She had never seen him use a pointer. It was the only thing she noticed about his teaching style that might strike one as objectionable.

  “This is math, Elise,” said Edith Gotswegon.

  “That’s okay,” said Mr. McQueen. “Sometimes these subjects bleed into one another.”

  This might have been Elise’s favorite thing out of Mr. McQueen’s mouth, up to that point, and she wanted some time to think about it, but Edith Gotswegon said, “The name of your horse bleeds into twelve times twenty?” She said “bleeds” as if she herself were bleeding.

  Mr. McQueen told Edith Gotswegon he was glad she was there. He said he counted upon her. This caused her tongue to roll up and disappear down her throat. Perhaps she would choke on it. She knew she had been slighted but not how.

  But Lorena! Lorena was beaming at Mr. McQueen.

  “The Beatitudes,” said Mr. McQueen.

  “Have we now bled into Sunday school?” said Edith Gotswegon.

  Mr. McQueen laughed. “Truly, Edith. Such a unique and special pleasure it is to have you here.”

  Joseph Womack, whose father, the Reverend Womack, closed the meeting at Bethel early owing to heavy rains, began to recite the Beatitudes. But he mumbled in such a register, so low and rote and without feeling, it became clear that he was asleep. He was dreaming that he’d been ordered to recite the Beatitudes. His lip bubbled slightly with spit.

  Mr. McQueen allowed it and waited patiently as if these sleep-talk Beatitudes were a flock of sheep crossing the road. God, how many were there? So far, Elise knew only one, the famous one about the meek, which she had never understood, since the whole point of being meek is so you don’t have to run things. This might be a question she could ask Mr. McQueen during science: What would the meek do with the earth, anyway?

  “Thank you, Joseph,” said Mr. McQueen when Joseph was done and the road was clear of sheep. Then he told how he had wanted to ride his horse from North Carolina to Lone Wolf, but he had read accounts of the Trail of Tears and understood the journey to be long and arduous.

  “Less so for me, of course. No one was forcing me out of my native land.”

  He paused to stare out the window at the driving snow, which unlike most snowstorms did not vary in intensity, did not light up and allow you to see the outhouse or the stable or the storm door being blown open by the wind, and muffled also every noise save the sound of the wind, which was not muffle-able on the prairie, and thank goodness for that, for the slap and creak and whistle, the orchestra of prairie conducted by the wind. He seemed to be trying to decide whether or not it was true that no one had forced him out of his native land. Elise had heard it said that Mr. McQueen was eighteen years of age. Who had told her this? Maybe she read it in the paper, as there was a significant write-up when he arrived, and it bothered her that she had forgotten a word of it.

  She studied him, easily done as he stood in front of the class like an artist’s model. He did not appear to shave, but it was difficult to tell on a fair-skinned man. The blue shadow darkening her black-haired father’s face was absent on Mr. McQueen, whose hair was the blond they call dirty, though it appeared clean. He was freckled. His hair parted cleanly and stayed parted, even when he took off his cap. Elise preferred things that did not stay put, so she placed Mr. McQueen’s hair in the “maybe” column in her assessment of his looks. Perhaps it was a limitation. Lorena had gotten her thinking about everyone’s limitations. She looked over at Lorena who was giving Mr. McQueen her attention. But Elise knew it was divided. Lorena’s attention could only always be divided. Her thoughts might not always mirror Elise’s, but forever would they intersect.

  “You will remember that I arrived by train.”

  “My Beulah girl!” cried Rickie Stoelenburg, as if this w
as the only thing he’d learned all year. The other boys, who thought Mr. McQueen not much (which was quite different, Elise knew, than not thinking much of him, though she still did not know what it meant, coming as it did from the Bulgarians), laughed in a way that made Elise panic. Maybe Mr. McQueen was going to inherit the earth while he was still on it but lose control of the class. Their laughter brought to mind her father, holding forth out by the barn with his idea men, including Big. What the connection was she did not care to investigate, out of fear of what she’d find.

  “I was not long off the train when I realized I would need a mount. There are so many different sights to see in this area. I wanted to visit them all. The Wichita Mountains, the Red River, all the neighboring villages.”

  “You mean the prairie dog villages?” said Arthur Leak.

  “Why yes,” said Mr. McQueen to Arthur Leak. “That is one thing I mean. You will not interrupt me again, Arthur, as I was asked a question and I am answering it. If anyone else cares to interrupt, it would be best to hold your tongue.”

  Quickly the vision in Elise’s mind—of Big Idea listening to her father hold forth by the barn—faded.

  “I inquired around about horse traders in the vicinity and was told about a man of Kiowa blood. I went to visit him. He is a noble man and the grandson of the man for whom this town was named.”

  “Everyone knows Quickly Speaking Wolf,” said Edith Gotswegon, as if she were exempt from Mr. McQueen’s warning. He did not tell her how lovely it was to be in her company. He did not look at her at all, which is all she wanted. The only way to shut her up was to ignore her.

  “Now let me tell you all something you might find hard to believe. It was not that many years ago that I was sitting where you sit.” (Elise did not find this hard to believe. He barely shaved, did Mr. McQueen.) “Though in a different school, of course. My school was also small and I walked to and fro. I did not own a horse. It was six miles round-trip. Where I come from there is a streak of redness in the earth that is violently beautiful. But it is tough going in rainy weather. The same qualities that give the soil its beauty—I am talking about the color of the clay—make it the devil to get off of your shoes.