Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  “Wherever she wants to go.”

  “And is this true?”

  His question struck me as ridiculous. “It is true that the horse knows the way from home to school,” I said.

  Then something occurred to me, and it was time for me to look at him curiously. “How is it that you are always standing in the barn waiting for us when we arrive?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You are either standing in the schoolyard or you are waiting in the barn. Every morning.”

  “It’s an interesting question, Lorena,” he said. “I’m afraid I have no idea what the answer is.”

  “Just luck, I suppose.”

  “I don’t believe in luck.”

  “I hope you believe in search parties,” I said.

  “Of course I do. But first I ought to try to find her on my own. She can’t have gotten far in this mess.”

  “And who will teach the children?”

  “I will leave you in charge.”

  I was flattered, but I was not going to stay there while he searched for Elise.

  “I am coming with you,” I said. “You can leave Edith Gotswegon in charge.”

  “Edith Gotswegon.” He tried to say the name flatly, without judgment, but there was a slightly interrogative lilt in the penultimate syllable.

  “She is at this very minute, at your command, reading to little Ella Holman from the papers of a reprobate.”

  “I suppose she’ll do. I will get The Beatitudes ready. You run in and tell them we will be gone and to break for lunch and, after lunch, to work on their mathematics and, after that, Latin.”

  “Edith Gotswegon’s Latin is mediocre at best.”

  “That’s true,” he said, and then quickly covered himself. “She’s proficient enough, she just needs to work on her verbs.”

  “She seems to excel at anatomy.”

  “She does seem to know her way around a skeleton.”

  “I will deliver your instructions and hurry back and we will leave.”

  “Ought we to inform your parents?”

  “My parents?”

  “Yes, Lorena. Your mother and father.”

  “A minute ago you seemed confident that you could find her yourself.”

  “I suppose we don’t want to alarm everyone.”

  Inside, I did not bother to knock the snow from my shoes or take off my wrap.

  “Mr. McQueen says for you to continue reading from Mr. Franklin’s autobiography until lunch,” I said to Edith, who held the volume from which she read one-handed, her other hand pointing dramatically at the ceiling. “After that, mathematics and, after that, anatomy.”

  “But today is Latin,” said Edith.

  “Your Latin is subpar.”

  “Far above the level of your piano playing,” said Edith, who inconveniently lived next door to Mrs. Robertson.

  “I have decided to switch to the violin,” I lied.

  “Where is our teacher?” asked Ella Holman. “Where has Elise gone to?”

  She has gone behind the preposition, I might have said to anyone else but little Ella Holman, sweet thing. She and Elise collected daisies for chains during recess and Elise taught her dumb half jokes that lacked punch lines. Elise would ask little Ella what the elephant said to the post office and the both of them would laugh until Ella developed hiccups.

  “Elise is about,” I said, making brilliant use of the vagueness of certain vernacular phrases. “Don’t worry, she will be along.”

  “How is it that you get to go out looking for her?” said one of the boys.

  “I am her sister.”

  “I feel like this is a man’s job,” said another of the boys. Why bother with names, they were all alike except for the Bulgarians.

  “Your feelings mean so much to me,” I said, “but the only man present is on the job already.”

  “You think you’re better than everyone else,” said Edith.

  “Not everyone,” I said.

  Throughout all this, the Bulgarian, the one Elise favored, appeared worried and drifty at once, while the other two slept with their mouths open. On my way out, I heard Edith Gotswegon accuse me of stealing her scarf.

  “Whatever took so long?” said Mr. McQueen.

  “We Oklahomans are an inquisitive lot.”

  “That has not been my experience,” he said. “Though your sister displays ample curiosity.”

  “She is curious, it’s true.” He helped me up onto his oddly named horse. He climbed up and he urged the horse through the knee-deep snow of the schoolyard. The road was only slightly visible and there were drifts in the fields as high as my shoulder. The coyote wind made talk difficult, but my voice, in certain high registers, carries sufficiently.

  “I admire the nostalgic instinct behind your choice to purchase this horse, who reminds you of your sufferings. True feeling is hard to come by and should be celebrated.”

  “And yet?” said Mr. McQueen.

  “Sir?”

  “You needn’t call me sir. You seem about to make another point entirely.”

  “I am just wondering about his ability to navigate the snow.”

  “Whose ability?”

  “The Beatitudes.” So far the horse appeared as cumbersome as his name.

  “He is a local.”

  “Unlike yourself.”

  “It snows where I come from.”

  “Surely not like this.”

  “No,” he said. “I have never seen anything even close to this.”

  “This is a record snowfall, according to the Kiowa County News. The worst of the century, though a friend of my father’s, who has lived in Lone Wolf his entire life, says this is the coldest it has been in over fifty years. This is abnormal. But they say the prairie is a punishing country.”

  “Who says that?”

  “I read it in the newspaper.”

  “I would think the newspaper would want to emphasize the region’s more positive qualities.”

  “I would think the ultimate goal of the newspaper would be to represent the world as it is.”

  To this he said only, “Hmmm,” as if to remind me he was my teacher, for this is the sound teachers make when they want you to know you have said something ignorant but have not the courage or energy to tell you so.

  He was quiet for a time. We were passing through town and it was also quiet. The drugstore was lit, as was the dry goods’ store, but the millinery and the tailor and the lawyer’s and the doctor’s offices were dark. The jail stood at the end of town, an ugly three-story brown stucco building, its barred windows, usually open to the elements, sealed by boards. Mr. McQueen slowed in front of it, as if he were thinking of enlisting the help of the sheriff.

  “Do you know the way to Hobart?” I asked.

  “I do. We take this road all the way.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Have you never been?”

  “Of course. But I did not measure the distance.”

  “I would put it at ten miles.”

  “How long ought it to take?”

  “On a day like today, a good while. How far a head start would you say she had?”

  I considered it. The question rankled, since I could have shortened her head start considerably had I spoken up.

  “Between eighteen and nineteen minutes.”

  “That’s very exact.”

  “You were looking for a guess?”

  “You are a very precise person.”

  Though he meant it as a compliment, this upset me. I wanted to tell him that I would in fact be perfectly happy to have a mind like my mother’s and my sister’s, fickle, dreamy, romantic, frighteningly lush and fragile. Or like my father’s, filled with half thoughts he called ideas. I wanted to say that I did not choose my personality, if that was what he was referring to.

  “What do you think is the point of life?” I asked.

  “Good heavens, Lorena.”

  “The question does not interest you?”

/>   “It’s minus six degrees out. I have no experience in this sort of weather, but it must be far colder than that, given that we are driving headlong into a wind. Your sister has been out here for an hour and is clearly in danger. The only thing that interests me at the moment is finding her, making sure she’s safe.”

  “You are trying to make me feel bad.”

  “No.”

  “You mean to suggest I am in some way responsible?”

  He fell quiet. I found his silences insufferable, even in the force of such wind, which could suck words out of your mouth before they passed through your lips and could quite possibly suck thoughts from your head or feelings from your heart. The lacerating wind brought tears to my eyes and they froze. The only warm part of me was my arms, laced about his body. He was slightly built. I could feel his rib cage even through several layers of clothes. He was taller than me by several inches and blocked the wind only to a point. We did not have long to find my sister, but I did not want to consider what might have happened to her.

  “It does seem you had an inkling that this might happen,” he said after one of his silences.

  “If I were to take seriously every crazy thing Elise has threatened to do, I would never let her out of my sight.”

  “What other things has she threatened to do?”

  I told him about the time she asked if I might deliver the mail to the prairie dog village for her, as Sandy had to be shoed and she wanted to be there to comfort him.

  “And do they get much mail, the prairie dogs?”

  “I don’t think you are taking this very seriously.”

  “Of course I am. I’ve left a class full of schoolchildren alone during a blizzard. I am as cold as I have ever been or hope to be in my life. It is a luxury to think of the mail received by prairie dogs.”

  A shadow loomed on the road ahead, and a rider emerged from the whiteness. A large man on a stout, low horse. Mr. McQueen held up his hand for the rider to halt.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Mr. McQueen. “Have you seen a young lady pass by here on a horse?”

  “Why, it’s Big Idea,” I said, recognizing his overlarge features despite the hat pulled low and tight over his eyes and his coat of some sort of animal fur—bear, perhaps—buttoned up to his throat and the kerchief tied about his mouth.

  Big Idea, of course, did not know that he was thus called, and he looked at me oddly as I struggled to remember his given name. Once you are accustomed to calling someone Big Idea, their real name could be Rumination Honeysuckle and it would be hardly memorable.

  “Who do you say?” said Big Idea.

  “Why it’s me, Lorena Stewart. Harold Stewart’s older daughter.”

  He nodded politely and smiled. He had pulled down his thin kerchief to speak and his beard glinted with ice crystals, but he did not seem the least bit cold. He had ample padding. It was a good day to be ample.

  Big Idea asked after my father. I said he was fine so far as I knew. About my father I knew nothing, so as long as I added “as far as I know” to every statement I made about him, I was continuing in the vein of precision.

  “Have you seen my sister, Elise? She is headed to Hobart alone.”

  “I seen a figure pass by on a horse, but in this mess I could not make any determination as to its sex. But now that I think over it, the horse cantered to the left like your nag tends.”

  I was glad Elise was not there to hear Big Idea call Sandy a nag.

  “How long ago, sir?” said Mr. McQueen.

  “Oh, I’m bad at time-telling. Especially when you can’t see the sun. It’s not been too long, though. Is she being followed?”

  “Well, yes,” said Mr. McQueen. “We are following her.”

  “Has she escaped? Committed a crime?”

  Mr. McQueen whispered over his shoulder to me. “This man is drunk.” Big Idea made no sign that he heard. He grinned largely, showing his lack of teeth.

  “No, she’s done nothing wrong except light out in this weather,” I said.

  “That’s not a crime, but it’s not shrewd. I say that having made the same decision and regretted it.”

  “You have been to Hobart?”

  “To see a man about a wagon,” he said.

  Mr. McQueen scoffed. I had never heard him scoff. He was not generally a scoffer.

  “Did you happen by a saloon while in Hobart?” I asked him.

  Big Idea brightened. Here was a question he could answer with certainty. “As a matter of fact, I did,” he said.

  “Did you happen by the saloon run by L. C. Ivent?”

  “L. C. Ivent is imprisoned for the crime of shooting Charley Sherman dead some three weeks ago.”

  “You know him?”

  “Everybody knows L.C.”

  Mr. McQueen said, “We must be on our way,” just when I was on the verge of finding out vital facts about the case.

  “Ought I to alert the authorities that the young lass is struck out in the storm alone on a lame horse?”

  “No thank you, and the horse is not lame,” I said, but my words were lost, for Mr. McQueen had urged his lumbering horse forward.

  “What was all that about?” said Mr. McQueen.

  “It was pertinent to our search.”

  “In what way?”

  “If Elise has reached Hobart, we will find her on the trail of L. C. Ivent.”

  “Who that fellow claimed was imprisoned for murder?”

  “Yes, presently, but it is his previous position that Elise is interested in.”

  “For her play.”

  “Yes.”

  “She is certainly willing to suffer for her art.”

  I saw no reason to encourage such thinking, since Elise’s action seemed to me less sacrificial than selfish.

  “Has she written many plays?”

  “All her plays feature Sandy. The brunt are musicals. Most include at least one nun.”

  “Is Sandy a fair tenor?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Elise sings his parts and mine too.”

  “Impressive,” said Mr. McQueen. The entire line of inquiry struck me as irresponsible. There was something aloof and untethered about Mr. McQueen. To be sure, he lacked rigor. Though he was kind and knowledgeable in certain areas (his Latin was fluent as far as I could tell, Latin not being offered to the girls by Professor Smythe, who said it was not something that would “get us ahead in the world”), there must be a reason why all the boys disliked him. He was not up to the task of pondering the point of life.

  There came a break in the storm. Our vista increased tenfold. We were still on the road, surrounded by snowy fields. The tips of fence posts peaked from the drifts. I could make out a smudge that suggested horizon. For three days sky and earth had merged, smeared together by snow. The wind died down as well.

  “Finally,” said Mr. McQueen. “Here comes a buggy.” He attempted to halt it, but its driver paid him no heed.

  “I suppose they are making hay while the sun shines,” said Mr. McQueen. He seemed unperturbed. The sun had not shown, so I did not know what he was talking about—there was no sign of any hay.

  Oddly enough, I was colder now that it had stopped snowing. Later I would realize it was too cold to snow. I began to shiver. Mr. McQueen felt it.

  “We should turn back,” he said, “and find some shelter for you.”

  “I am fine.”

  “I can hear your teeth, Lorena.”

  I held my tongue between my teeth to stop the chattering.

  We made slow progress in eerie silence. Presently a farmhouse appeared. Smoke slightly lighter than the sky curled from its chimney.

  “We shall stop there,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “You need to get warm.”

  I tried to say, again, that I was fine, but my words, wavy with vibrato, betrayed me. It was true that I was freezing. With Elise against me, in the blanket, I grew cold, but it was tolerable always. Mr. McQueen’s body, I decided, was not producing enough
heat. And if we were, together, this incapacitated, what about Elise, out there alone?

  Elise could die out here. She could have already died.

  It wasn’t only that I would be losing another sibling and that my family would be reduced to Mother, Father, and me. It wasn’t what it would do to Mother, which was more than likely turn her mind just far enough so that she would be lost to us forever. It wasn’t that it might have killed my mother outright. It was that Elise, for all her annoying habits, brought me such joy. Oh he did did, she would say, and I would relax into the swirl that was being with Elise. I rolled down hills with her and swung from vines and branches, all the while sitting atop Sandy or in the hayloft or lying in bed together on a cold night. I dove into rivers, beneath the waves of the sea. Elise took me along.

  The sobs that wracked me Mr. McQueen took for a fit of tremors brought on by exposure. He pulled up on the reins and stopped his silly-named horse in the road. He lifted me down and wrapped me tightly in his arms. I had never any more than shaken a man’s hand. I buried my face in his scarf, which smelled of wood smoke, sweat, and wet wool. I closed my eyes. I don’t know how long we held our embrace, but it seemed several minutes passed before I felt him jerk his head up as if he’d been called. “Good heavens,” he said.

  I lifted my head just as he rather roughly let go of me and launched himself into the field. I had been holding on to him so hard that I fell backward onto the road. I was too cold to be angry, and I lay staring at the white nothing sky for a few seconds before I pushed myself up and spotted Mr. McQueen in the pasture. He ran splay-legged, his legs snapping like a cloth-bound pair of scissors. Every fourth step he fell. He got up again. He called my sister’s name. In the far distance I saw Sandy. He was standing at the edge of the field, which seemed the edge of the earth itself. He was partly in the sky.

  On his back I saw only a lump. I took off running. Mr. McQueen was calling out my sister’s name, but I knew she could not hear him so I called out to Sandy, who did not speak English or Island, as Elise insisted. He recognized the voices of his loved ones, did Sandy. His name bounced off the snow banks and he lifted his head wearily. He pushed through the snow toward us. We made our way to him, he made his way to us. Mr. McQueen had Elise in his arms when I got to them and he was speaking to her softly. I collapsed against Mr. McQueen, my body taken over again by shudders and sobs. It was indeed my fault, all my fault, and I had no one, not Edith Gotswegon, not Mr. McQueen, least not Elise, upon whom to reflect my self-hatred.