Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  “What sort of music does your father like?” she asked him.

  “He is fond of march.”

  March? Elise knew only Chopin’s funeral march, which was far too lugubrious for the occasion.

  “Do you know the march of John Phyllis Susan?”

  “Good heavens,” she said. “Your father has certainly taken to America.”

  “I like also ‘Grand Old Flag,’” said Damyan.

  They were certainly doing her a good turn, and if they wanted a parade, she’d have to oblige. She herself could never get steady with an admirer of the likes of Sousa, but on the other hand, it was not her job to convert him to the Goldberg Variations.

  She played “Semper Fidelis,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and, for Damyan, “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” As they came into town she switched to the slightly less pompous Stephen Foster: first “Camptown Races” (the Bulgarian boys woke to sing, Oh the doo dah day) and then “Oh! Susanna.” Their accents added a desirably melancholic element to the fellow coming from Louisiana with a banjo on his knee. The harshness of their consonants turned even the silliest song plaintive.

  People came out of their houses as they passed. Dusty children and bored dogs followed the wagon, and her father, on Buck, pranced alongside, beaming. Elise was surprisingly not mortified. Why? How far was she willing to stoop to free herself from life on the Lorena-less farm? She banged out “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they pulled up in front of Mr. McQueen’s bungalow. He came out onto the porch, looking both bewildered and amused. Elise decided that his amusement came from a false notion that she was being ironic, when actually (and this worried her) she was roused by all this sentimental rubbish.

  Mr. McQueen had hung a couple of pictures on the walls of her piano room—a Turner reproduction, which she quite liked for its muted orange light, and a painting of a river with a gaggle of small boys gathered on its banks, fishing poles flung over their shoulder, barefooted, their towheads covered by straw hats. Was this supposed to remind her of the time he flung the nasty-minded boys in the river? If Lorena were here, she would tell Elise not to assign meaning to everything, but Lorena was off in college, learning to assign meaning to everything.

  In one corner was a table and, placed atop it, a vase of well-intentioned wildflowers. The room lacked a rug, but she could bring one from home.

  Mr. McQueen conversed with the Bulgarian’s father in the few words he had picked up from the boys. Elise’s father supervised the unloading and placement of the piano, for he had a bad back himself.

  Mr. McQueen gave Damyan and his brothers nickels and sent them off to the picture show, then invited the Bulgarian and her father to stroll down the street for a beer.

  “We won’t be long,” he told Elise, and she nodded and smiled and nearly bowed trying to get them out of there. The words “Should auld acquaintance be forgot” were stuck in her head and she set down to play a Bach prelude to try to dislodge them. She was alone in Mr. McQueen’s house. She quit playing when her head was clear, got up, and walked around, feeling like a ghost come back to search for still-living kin—in this case, her sister. For she felt Lorena’s presence everywhere—in the parlor, in the kitchen, even in Mr. McQueen’s spartan bedroom. She opened his narrow closet and flipped through his hanging clothes, searching for one of her dresses. Lorena was there even though she left no physical trace. What was a physical trace worth anyway?

  The men came home from the saloon and sat talking on the porch as she serenaded them through the open window. Then the boys arrived, oddly jolly—even Damyan—from having seen The Virginian. Elise’s father said he would ride home with the Bulgarians and left Buck tied to a tree in the yard. Elise sat down with Mr. McQueen on his front porch, waving at the cheery Bulgarians, her father talking wildly with his hands to his new friend.

  “This is the most exciting thing to happen on Fourth Street since I don’t know when,” said Mr. McQueen.

  “Likely since the young schoolteacher moved in. What news of my brilliant sister?”

  “She has been advised that she must take chemistry.”

  “Oh dear,” said Elise, though she knew this already from Lorena’s most recent letter. “We may well be reading about a ghastly explosion in the no-longer-so-still town of Stillwater.”

  “As I understand it, it’s not chemistry if something does not ignite. As I understand it,” he repeated, “not having gone to college myself.”

  “Did you always want to be a teacher?”

  “It never crossed my mind. I was working in a millinery shop, sweeping up ribbon and thread, when you could say I was drafted.” He told the story of Dr. Hall coming to his house. Of his mediocre performance in school until, late in his studies, he revealed his talent for memorization.

  “Your good memory bodes well for your piano playing.”

  “More is required than memorization, though, I’m sure. I would wager that the inexplicable ingredient is what makes your playing so graceful and precise.”

  “The what?”

  “Your true cry, Elise.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, as if he were referring to her nine-fingered technique rather than the essence of her very being. “I don’t think I’ll ever be a serious person.”

  Mr. McQueen laughed. “Your great appeal is what sometimes makes you hard to understand, Elise. But back to your point: I don’t think I will either.”

  “It’s your part,” she said.

  “My part? My part to play in life, you mean?”

  “No,” she said, and reached over and touched the place where his comb so carefully separated his hair. “It’s too perfect,” she said.

  “Ought I to alter it in some way?”

  “Never. It’s the perfect part that makes you imperfect and therefore disqualifies you from serious personhood.”

  Mr. McQueen said something vaguely profound-sounding about how Persian rug makers always left some irregularity in their stitching to show their belief that no human design could be without blemish. Only God can create perfection, etcetera. But Elise could tell that, halfway through his spiel, he recognized how pedantic he sounded, so she stepped in to save him from himself.

  “Lorena is a serious person,” said Elise.

  Mr. McQueen was silent.

  “It’s all she’s ever wanted in life.”

  Mr. McQueen’s silence grew louder.

  “I think it has to do with our raising,” said Elise. “My father is anything but serious, given as he is to the endless discussion of ideas.”

  “Ideas are not serious?”

  “Ideas are indeed serious. It’s going around thinking you have one and proceeding to tell everyone all about it that distinguishes you as not serious.”

  “And your mother? Is she a serious person?”

  “My mother has lately exhibited signs of rejoining the party.”

  Mr. McQueen waited for more, but Elise changed the subject.

  “We’ve yet to discuss the particulars of our arrangement. Every time I bring it up you put me off. Why is that?”

  “I’ve no head for business,” said Mr. McQueen.

  “But I do, and I do not feel comfortable embarking on our joint venture until some terms have been agreed upon.”

  “You’ve worn me down,” said Mr. McQueen. “State your terms.”

  “Go fetch paper and pencil,” she said. “Nothing in the business world is valid until recorded and endorsed by signature.”

  In time, they came up with an agreement that Elise felt was too much in her favor. She argued with him, but he put an end to it by saying she was family.

  This made her feel not treasured, as he had no doubt intended, but placed in a category that did not feel, well, right. She wondered if he and Lorena were secretly engaged. Could Lorena keep something like that from her?

  No, she would know if they were engaged, just like she knew when they Got Steady. Lorena went around with her for weeks and said nothing, but Elise knew all the sam
e. Elise was not of the mind that secrets were the same as lies (they were more like second cousins). Hadn’t Lorena and Mr. McQueen kept secret the reason for her wandering off into the storm?

  The storm made Elise think of Big Idea. She had never spoken to him, but she had heard his voice in the storm. It seemed to Elise like someone else might be speaking to her through that icy wind, when she was convinced that she and Sandy had ridden right into heaven, which was much like the North Pole, apparently. She was turning blue, yellow, and white, and the snow was turning red. The voice of God should come at such moments, but she heard Big Idea. “Big Idea,” she called out, and somewhere miles away on the prairie a stranger, fetching her mail or feeding his cows, heard in the wind the true cry of a frozen girl.

  “Elise,” said Mr. McQueen. She looked over at him. Other people were out on their porches of an evening backlit in pink dusk. Instead of swarms of bugs, the golden light identified each insect. She saw the stingers of mosquitoes and flies rubbing their hands greedily. What a strange thing it was to look right and see other people and then left and see more of the same. She had discovered civilization. Mr. McQueen allowed as how he too had come up in the country without neighbors within sight, and life on Fourth Street in tiny Lone Wolf was a marvel to him. The sidewalks, the gaslights, the church bells chiming on the hour. At night he heard through his open windows the noises of cutlery scraping plates, of babies splashing in bathtubs. He heard singing, from mediocre to atrocious.

  “Sometimes I can hear the doors of an icebox suck shut,” he said. “I have heard the clothes-less hangers clang together in someone’s closet. Think about it.”

  She thought about it. She thought maybe he only thought he heard it, but it was the same thing.

  “Do you fear loneliness?”

  “I do,” he said. “I have. It was why I went at night to the river. But I could have crossed the river to escape my loneliness and I did not do it. I liked the power that came from not letting myself. So you might say I fear it as I court it.”

  She nodded. “I only wanted to write that stupid play to get Lorena to come with me to the barn. Every afternoon when we got home she went straight to Mother’s bedroom and combed her hair. I missed her. So I decided I would write the story of the murder of Sherman by Ivent so that it involved a dramatic fall from the hayloft onto a carefully placed blanket of hay. This is not what happened, as you know. Ivent was shot in a saloon, but I think you will agree that such facts do not matter to the playwright. Anyway, I had to offer Lorena the part of Sherman, who falls after being shot by Ivent, but she was not swayed. We disagreed about some minor details. What she called fact. We had never argued over facts before. It was disturbing, at least to me, for it seemed somehow that our lives changed the moment she held fast to her facts.

  “Anyway, the reason I left school and went blindly and with foolish disregard into a blizzard, endangering not only my life but yours and Lorena’s, was because I did not want to be alone.”

  She turned to Mr. McQueen.

  “I am sorry,” she said. Then she remembered: he knew this already. He knew even more than she did about the real reason she went blindly into the storm. He came to the hospital to tell her. He had pulled his chair close to speak of her true cry.

  But he only nodded and reached out and rubbed her shoulder. It was an innocuous gesture meant to say, Please do not give it a minute’s thought. But when his fingers touched her collarbone, she felt the presence of her missing toes and the finger upon which some man might have decided to slip a ring in front of a preacher, and also the tip of her nose, which she had forgotten was even missing. She felt her shame blossom into pleasure.

  She said, “I need to get going, although, my goodness, but is it not pleasant here at this hour.” Porch-sitters out on both sides of the street, old women cooling themselves with cardboard church fans, children hiding behind shrubs, and dogs chasing the children around, everyone as happy as pigs. She wanted to stay until the dark blinked with lightning bugs. She would have liked to wake to the sound of the Kiowa County News tossed sidearm but accurately by a boy on a bicycle onto the dew-wet grass. She would have liked to run outside in her nightgown barefoot to retrieve it and read aloud to Mr. McQueen while he sipped his coffee all the doings and goings-on and, if they were lucky, a murder involving an agent of the Schlitz Brewing Company.

  “I better be going,” she said again.

  “I’ll be seeing a lot of you.”

  “Your terms are too favorable toward me.”

  “As I understand it, a contract, once signed, is immediately binding.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about a contract.”

  “It’s true,” he said, smiling. “I don’t.”

  “I can always tell.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You were my teacher,” she said. “I gave you the benefit of my doubt. I assumed you knew everything there is to know. And you know a lot. But sometimes you know things because you have read them in a book the night before and you remember the facts in the proper order. Like all that business about prehistoric animals blazing the Natchez Trace.”

  “But that is not a lie.”

  “You must,” she said, getting up, “tell me more about the dead sheep that washed up on the shore of the river. You must say more about the river. More about why you went there. More about whether or not it helped to go there. I want to know what you learned. I daresay that will be more helpful for me in my pursuits than the origins of the Natchez Trace.”

  Mrs. Robertson had left a dozen pupils in need of instruction and she was kind enough to write to them recommending Elise. Elise’s mother could no longer afford to keep Mr. McQueen on, so he took a job proofreading the Kiowa County News. He went to their offices directly after school. Some days she did not see him. On Saturday she came into town to teach an older woman, Miss Pruett. She was nearly thirty, rich, haughty, and without talent. Elise could hear Mr. McQueen moving around the house as she reminded Miss Pruett to curl her fingers at the knuckles. For some reason she pictured Mr. McQueen shaving, though she knew this to be a morning ritual and it was getting on toward lunchtime. Did he wear an undershirt or stand shirtless before the mirror? Miss Pruett finished her scales, and Elise said “Again” in the stern manner of Mrs. Robertson. Miss Pruett disliked taking lessons from a sixteen-year-old girl, Elise could tell, but her only other choice was to travel to Hobart, and she was too busy being rich and idle for that.

  Mr. McQueen appeared in the doorway after Miss Pruett left. Elise was packing up to leave.

  “I feel it is probably advantageous to start piano lessons when you are still young,” he said, referring to the abysmal playing of Miss Pruett and, by extension, to his own upcoming instruction.

  “You are not very scientific.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Basing your hypothesis on only one test case. Besides, she is hoping to find a husband, one with money and taste. So she is attempting to round herself out, culturally I mean. She’s plenty round otherwise. The sad thing is she is getting a little long in the tooth.”

  “That woman who just left? She appears to be about thirty.”

  “An ancient crone in these parts. She might as well settle for a Kiowa. Perhaps one with a couple of wives already.”

  “The Kiowa are not bigamists.”

  Mr. McQueen had a special interest in the Kiowa. He once told Lorena and Elise that after he first arrived he asked Mr. C. H. Griffith if he would have to learn their language to teach them and was shocked to discover that they had their own school.

  “Your point seems to be that it is too late for you to learn to play the piano. Frankly I am disheartened by such a sentiment. When is it ever too late to learn?”

  “I have been set straight,” said Mr. McQueen, feigning resignation.

  “You will submit to lessons per our agreement. Otherwise we will have to renegotiate our terms.”

  “‘Submit’ is an unappealing verb.” />
  “You will enrich your life with piano lessons as agreed upon, etcetera.”

  “I prefer ‘submit,’” he said.

  “‘Submit,’ as you pointed out, almost suggests punishment. But you will love taking lessons.”

  “And so the student becomes the teacher.”

  “Does that make you nervous?”

  “Not in the least. You have been teaching me since I arrived here.”

  “So has Edith Gotswegon, in her way.”

  “You and your sister are obsessed with Edith Gotswegon.”

  “It is what she stands for. She herself does not exist, or rather, if she exists at all, it is in the music of her name, which is fun to say and so aptly captures what she stands for.”

  “She makes good sense and that appears to be her goal in life.”

  “You are distracting me. When would you like to experience the distinct joy of a piano lesson?”

  “Some night this week will have to do. I am going to Stillwater for the weekend.”

  Elise nodded. Mr. McQueen looked at his feet.

  The day before, while he was still at his proofreading job at the Kiowa County News and she was done with her lessons, she had searched his house for Lorena’s letters, which she had found in his sock drawer, of course. But how had she known that men hid everything in their sock drawer? Was she born with this knowledge? Are all women born knowing such?

  She read them. Later, when she asked after Lorena (pretending that Lorena did not write home, which he likely knew was not true), the facts he shared were the same Lorena reported: she hated chemistry; her roommate was Oklahoma City society and had so many dresses Lorena barely had room in the closet; the weather; food; football team; etcetera. But the letters went beyond reportage. Elise expected her sister to be mushy, but this was a shock. Oh, how I long for you to hold me. I miss your lips. I’d give everything I own (What, wondered Elise, was she referring to? The pearl-handled brush-and-mirror set Mother had lent her? Her mother’s beloved steamer trunk?) to be lying beside you, Gus, running my hand through your hair.