Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  “About why I went to Hobart.”

  “I’ve not really hired myself out to stand in a field scaring away crows,” said Mr. McQueen. He had to change the subject, he had to. But why? Later she would ask him why. But at the moment she only smiled and said, “I take it you are working for Father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have the two of you exchanged ideas?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Father is an idea man.”

  “Oh yes,” said Mr. McQueen. “I’ve heard him say so. We don’t talk much.”

  “That’s good. Someone needs to tend to things. What has he got you doing?”

  “Right now I’m repairing fence. I’m sort of a handyman.”

  “And are you handy like that?”

  “My father taught me some things. He could build anything. He built houses, barns, bridges, fences, gates. He dug ponds. He built fireplaces out of river rock.”

  “Your father has passed?” said Lorena.

  “Yes,” said Mr. McQueen.

  “And your mother?”

  “Many years ago.”

  “And have you any brothers and sisters back east?” asked Elise.

  “No,” he said. “It’s only me.” Then, after the pause that comes when someone declares that they are all alone in the world, he said, “I had a younger brother, but he died. And my aunt, who raised me, is still alive.”

  This would be the aunt to whom you attempt to describe in letters the facial expressions of your students, Elise thought to say but did not, for Lorena’s sake as much as for Mr. McQueen’s.

  It was as if because he was standing in his dirty work clothes, in their parlor, they could ask him anything. Though Elise did not feel like anything they had asked him was something she would not have raised her hand and put to him during, say, botany.

  “Well, I suppose we shall be seeing a lot of you,” said Elise, looking at Lorena.

  Mr. McQueen said, “Your father keeps me pretty busy.”

  “I suppose he does,” she said, looking out the window to see her father in the mouth of the barn, holding forth to a group of fellow ideologues.

  “You might talk to him about digging the well deeper,” said Elise. “The water tastes of granite. Also, the windmill is rusty and in need of repair. Its creaking keeps me awake nights.”

  Lorena said that she felt sure Mr. McQueen had his hands quite full without Elise adding to the list.

  “And are you called Mr. McQueen when you are dressed in those clothes?” said Elise.

  Lorena, who was leaving at the end of the summer for university in Stillwater to become a teacher herself said, “You can’t very well call him one thing out of class and another when school starts back, Elise.”

  “And what do you call him?”

  “I better be getting back to work,” said Mr. McQueen.

  “Goodbye, Mr. McQueen,” said Elise. “Thank you for stopping in. We get few visitors.”

  Lorena walked out with Mr. McQueen. Presently Elise heard the kitchen door slam, then her sister’s ten-toed steps on the stairs, then the door to their bedroom close.

  She put her head down on the top of the piano and attempted to find, in a trill of high flats and sharps, the music of her true cry.

  That night in bed, Lorena said into the dark, “I have graduated.”

  “I know. I attended the ceremony, such as it was.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my seeing him now.”

  “By seeing him, what do you mean exactly?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Lorena had never had a boyfriend. Now she had Mr. McQueen. It wasn’t that it did not seem fair. It was more that it did not seem plausible. It was as if she had skipped over all the middle rungs on the ladder. Not that Mr. McQueen was the top rung. His part stayed put in a way that made him seem like a photograph, and even Lorena herself had expressed dismay at his teaching methods, especially when he did things like ask little Ella to spell the word miraculous.

  “No, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Okay, fine. Are you going to marry him?”

  “I am going to college.”

  “Is he going to go with you to Still Waters?”

  “No, why would he? He has a job already.”

  “Does Mother know?”

  “Only in the way she knows the things she knows.”

  “That means you didn’t tell her.”

  “That means, why should I?”

  “Okay,” said Elise.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, can I go with you two to the river on Sunday?”

  “How did you know we are going to the river on Sunday?”

  “I read the paper, Elise. That is where courting couples go of a Sunday afternoon.” And then Elise listed the couples seen frolicking by the riverside near Lugert. The list was long and Lorena drifted asleep to it, the rhythms of the Kiowa County News being both singsong and soporific. But the words they had spoken remained in the space between their beds. Are you going to marry him? Okay. Okay what? He has a job already.

  Sometimes Sandy came for her in the night. Elise could hear him snorting outside, announcing his arrival. Elise would rise and put on her customized shoes the doctor had made for her, and she would steal downstairs past her parents’ open bedroom door (it was hard to walk quietly in the cumbersome shoes) and climb atop her waiting Sandy. Moonlight lit the prairie. They took off across it, paying no heed to Father’s cotton, jumping the fences Mr. McQueen had been hired to mend. As soon as she was in the saddle, Elise had her toes back. Her once-missing finger sported a ring, which glowed golden in the moonlight. The day she got lost in the storm she had seen the snow turn red. She lost her shoes early on (she remembered taking them off, but she did not remember why) and her socks were wet. Her knickers were wet, her dress was soaked, the hats and scarves and gloves she wore were frozen stiff. She took to shivering so much she could not hold on to the reins. She clung to Sandy’s neck. She sang to him. But Sandy stopped moving and the snow turned red. Elise looked down and saw a fence post. She looked back and forth, searching for another, but it was snowing too hard, and besides, of course there was more than one fence post. There is never only one fence post.

  Sandy, stay put, she said, but Sandy wanted to get them to shelter. Elise saw the fence post moving and she saw the snow bleed as Sandy broke free. They moved off into the drifts. The road was gone. They had passed to the other side of this life. If hell is supposed to be fiery, heaven, reason would suggest, is but snow and ice and bitter cold. Why is that not in the Bible? But Sandy left a trail of red. Elise looked back over her shoulder at the red trail and this is when she got scared.

  They say her skin was blue as the veins beneath her skin. They say her lips were blue, her forehead yellow, her fingers and toes and nose finally white. My hair turned blue and Sandy turned the snow red. I lived, but Sandy was sent away. It’s okay, though, as Sandy is an ocean horse. In Mexico, he dives from cliffs into the sea. Tourists pay to see him plunge into the surf. The surf licks the rocks far below the cliffs, but Sandy knows just where to aim so that he sinks down among the fish, who welcome his presence. They call him World’s Largest Sea Horse. This tickles Sandy every time.

  A sadness fell over the days of the summer after Elise was lost in the storm. She had to learn to walk again. The Bulgarians were at work in the fields and she was done with them anyway, even Damyan. She was not self-conscious about her nose, even though children and some adults stared at it. For years, everyone had stared at Lorena, who was prettier and took care to dress appropriately and combed her hair with mother-of-pearl. After she graduated, she took to wearing lipstick. Now Elise drew stares. She preferred invisibility. So she stayed home, played the piano (which she learned had been donated by the Women of the Church, who thought Elise would now be housebound or confined to a wheelchair; she wondered if, when they saw her out and about in her heavy customized shoes, they woul
d regret their generosity), and read books with horses in them.

  Mr. McQueen, who Lorena now called Gus, came after church one Sunday to take them to the river. He borrowed a buggy from Mr. C. H. Griffith, who ran the First National Bank of Lone Wolf and had hired him to teach school. Mr. McQueen helped Lorena into the buggy, but Elise refused his aid with a smile. She hoisted herself up and nudged her sister closer to Mr. McQueen with her hip.

  The Beatitudes seemed befuddled by the contraption to which he was harnessed and the task he was being asked to perform. Mr. McQueen had to recite The Beatitudes to get him started and even then it was slow going down the Lugert Road to the river.

  “Has he never pulled a buggy before?”

  “It’s been a while,” said Mr. McQueen.

  “It’s like falling off a horse,” Elise called out to The Beatitudes, which made Lorena giggle.

  At the river Lorena and Elise changed into their bathing suits in the woods, which made Elise feel frisky. The trees, their thick exotic cover, hugged the riverbank, leafy and embracing. But the thrill of being nearly naked in public did not diminish the difficult time she had balancing on her good foot as she stepped out of her knickers. She had to steady herself on a tree. Through the branches she spotted two young boys, spying. She wrapped her arm around the tree trunk, grabbed her all but toeless leg, and hoisted it up for them to see. She heard gasps and the rustle of boys fleeing.

  “What are you doing over there?” asked her sister, who was dressing behind another tree.

  “Exercising,” said Elise.

  “Do you need help getting dressed?”

  “No,” she said, but she had to sit to put on her shoes. She felt silly wearing her bathing suit and her monstrous black shoes. She hardly ever felt silly, so why did she insist on accompanying them? Surely Lorena would prefer she stay home.

  The riverbank was crowded with young couples, families, and packs of filthy-minded boys. These boys saw her coming. They watched from the bank as she took off her shoes under the tree where Mr. McQueen had spread a blanket.

  Mr. McQueen was slicing a watermelon with his pocketknife, clearly for the first time. It was difficult to watch. He resembled The Beatitudes harnessed to a buggy.

  She wanted to fling herself into the river, but that required passing by the filthy-minded boys, who were already loudly discussing her foot. However, she did not come here to watch Mr. McQueen make a mess out of a watermelon, and she knew Lorena would appreciate having some time alone with this Gus fellow.

  Slowly she made her way along the bank. The boys were not quiet, being young and filthy-minded.

  “She walks like Frankenstein himself,’ said one of the boys.

  “You will too when I cut off your toes,” said Elise.

  But this only incited them. They got up and followed her, mimicking her walk. She felt them behind her and for the first time she was ashamed of her condition. She walked a few steps farther when she heard one of the boys cry out, followed by a splash.

  Mr. McQueen had taken the last boy in line and tossed him over the bank. He had another in his arms and the boy was squirming.

  “Stop it,” said Elise. “What if the boy can’t swim?”

  Mr. McQueen nodded toward the boy he’d just tossed in, who was sculling a few feet off the bank, a smile on his face, enjoying the show.

  “River rats,” he said.

  “Carry on, then,” she said, but the other boys were long gone by then. Mr. McQueen held the fidgety boy, whispering something in his ear, which made him shake his head wildly and, when freed, scamper off into the woods.

  “That will teach them, teacher,” said Elise in lieu of thanks. She did not want him to come her aid, but nor did she mind it.

  Mr. McQueen said he fancied a dip.

  “What about Lorena?”

  “She says she’s not ready to get her hair wet.”

  “Not something I ever need to work myself up to do.”

  “Nor I,” said Mr. McQueen. But she noticed that in the river, even after he’d dunked beneath the surface, his part remained perfect.

  They floated on their backs. Normally, only her nose and breasts and knees and fingers and toes would break the surface. Now it was chin, breasts, knees.

  Things had changed. She could have died.

  “I thought we’d died,” she said.

  “Just now?”

  “Not us,” she said. “Me and Sandy, in the snow.”

  “Well,” he said. He became sincere and tentative, as were they all when the subject came up.

  “I was thinking, when we were dying, that if you burn in hell, you must freeze in heaven.”

  “That makes sense to me and I am not lost in a storm.”

  “Everything makes sense in the water,” she said.

  “I had a river in my backyard growing up,” he said. “I went there almost every night.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “Once I saw a washed-up sheep.”

  “Say more on this subject.”

  Mr. McQueen said about the river shearing the sheep’s fur. He said it was a peaceful river that could turn treacherous. Snakes sunned themselves on rocks.

  “What sort of snakes?”

  “They might have been branches,” he said.

  “But the sheep was real? Because surely you know by now that it doesn’t matter to me if it wasn’t.”

  “I know,” he said, “but it was real.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  “To get away from my father.”

  “Was he an idea man?”

  “The opposite. He was a man whose hands were never idle, lest he feel something.” He told Elise about the house, the built-on rooms, the grand chimney, the ponds dug and the bridges built across them. He told her about the bench that only he sat on. He told her about the fire, how he was walking home and saw it before he smelled it and mistook it for the most amazing sunset.

  Mr. McQueen’s first name was being called, shrilly, from shore.

  “It appears Lorena is ready to wet her hair,” said Elise.

  They had drifted a good ways down the river. Lorena had followed on a path beaten clean by the feet of a thousand lovers. It wound around trees, their naked roots snaking down to the water, the dirt beneath them washed away by the current. They looked to Elise like cages or traps.

  Elise said she would swim back.

  “Against the current?” he asked, but just as quickly he begged her forgiveness. He saw the look on her face and said he must have forgotten whom he was talking to.

  Sometimes Elise went to the river with them on Sundays. Always they asked. But she got the feeling it was mostly Mr. McQueen behind the asking, and out of politeness. Was he polite? She had gotten him to talk about Edith Gotswegon once. All he said about her was that she “made very good sense and that seemed to be her goal in life,” which was not on the surface a criticism, but Elise knew Mr. McQueen just well enough to know that it was. It was not polite to talk about your former students, even Edith Gotswegon. But it meant he was alive, despite the perfect part in his hair, which not even a river could disturb.

  There wasn’t anything much to do on the Sundays Elise declined to go to the river. The Bulgarians drove their wagon thirty miles to attend an Orthodox church with other Bulgarians. When she was not with Mr. McQueen, Lorena was busy preparing to leave for Stillwater. It would not seem to Elise that one needed to prepare much at all to move to a place called Stillwater. When Elise said the name made the town sound terribly exciting, Lorena said it was better than Lone Wolf, though Elise knew she was sad about leaving Lone Wolf because it meant leaving behind Mr. McQueen, whom she now called Gus.

  Mr. McQueen could be seen around the property dressed as a field hand. Sometimes on blustery days he wore a kerchief over his mouth and nose as if he had just robbed a bank. Elise saw him in the yard and told him that since she had survived prairie fever, she could breathe all the dust she wanted with immunity. She said by the
time she was forty years old, her lungs would have enough dirt in them to grow a tomato plant.

  Mr. McQueen said that sounded painful.

  “Oh, it doesn’t hurt at all if you’re used to it. It’s only those who did not grow up breathing dust who go around like bank robbers.”

  Mr. McQueen said he was referring to tomatoes growing in her lungs.

  “Not painful in the least,” she said. “Tickles a bit, though.”

  She often thought of floating down the river with him that afternoon when Lorena was waiting until she was ready to get her hair wet. She remembered his tales of washed-up sheep and snakes stretched across rocks in the sun. It seemed he was trying to tell her something else. But Elise liked to believe that everyone was always trying to tell you something else. Even her mother when she said to her father, “Harold, would you please pass the salt?” And Lorena, when she was trying to corral Elise’s thoughts during the night with her bossy sleep-breath. Thank goodness everyone was trying to tell you something else entirely, for if the world were made up only of what actually came out of people’s mouths, Elise would prefer the frozen eternity of heaven.

  In late August, Elise spent several days helping Lorena pack for Stillwater. A steamer trunk appeared in their room. It had a lid curved like a treasure chest and another flat lid inside, also hinged, lined with fabric and fitted with small compartments, a couple of which also had lids.

  “Where has this been all my life?” asked Elise.

  “Mother used it when she went off to college.”

  “And she hid it all these years?”

  “She knew if she didn’t, you would lock yourself up in it and asphyxiate.”

  “I’m smart enough to poke holes in the sides with an ice pick.”

  “Even more reason to hide it from your sight.”

  Elise asked if Mr. McQueen was going to borrow C. H. Griffin’s buggy and drive her to Stillwater.

  “Stillwater is nearly two hundred miles from here. Do you know how long it would take The Beatitudes to travel two hundred miles?”

  “You’re saying no, he’s not.”

  “He’ll take me to the train.”

  “Where will we say goodbye?”

  “You can come to the station also.”