Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea, storing Lorena’s letters in his sock drawer. It seemed an obvious hiding place, though he would not have put it beyond Elise to rummage through his underwear drawer. He could have left Lorena’s letters on the table, tied with the snippet of ribbon he’d found in a pants pocket, a reminder of his life in Hibriten, his past securing his future, but it did not seem in good taste, given the tone of the letters. They were impassioned. Lying in bed nights, he reread them and he could feel the blood start to flow through veins that became a vast network of tracks conveying trains to a central location. And then the convergence in his groin, and minutes later he would catch his breath with his pants around his shins and his stomach coated with semen. This is the only way he knew to truly answer her letters. He did not know how to write the sort of sentences that brought to life, in the push and pull of their very music, he and Lorena, lying beneath a weeping willow by the river, twisting around on a scratchy Kiowa blanket, kissing until their lips were chapped, for that was as far as they had taken it, as far as they would take it until they were properly married.

  How, he wondered, did Lorena know to write such sentences? She knew because there was nothing between her words and her feelings. Even the paper she wrote on—even the envelope that transported the letter to Lone Wolf, even the stamp—seemed extraneous. She loved him, did Lorena. And he loved her, though what came between his feelings and his words?

  “Your wife awaits you,” Elise called from the dining room.

  Gus found his kerchief and tied it around his neck. He did not have a thing to hide from Elise and yet the thought of her reading Lorena’s letters made him queasy in the way he used to feel when Aunt Mattie failed to pack his lunch and he grew so hungry his stomach ached. Why should Gus feel empty instead of spied upon? He pictured Elise standing right where he was standing, her hands in his sock drawer. Her eyes would be closed. She would be pretending that the drawer was filled with salt water and the balls of socks were sand dollars or shark’s teeth. Or maybe she would yank open every drawer in the house, contents spilling out of them, as if the place had been ransacked. She would find the letters and read them aloud sitting on the edge of the bed, her sister’s impassioned sentences climbing up and down the keyboard, mostly wrong notes to Elise’s trained ear, annoying as a crow’s caw.

  Gus pulled his kerchief up over his mouth as if prepared for a windstorm.

  “Tell me your dream,” Elise said when he came into the room.

  “Rebecca,” said Gus. “I have had a solemn warning and I know the meaning of it.”

  “Lucky you,” said Elise.

  “Don’t interrupt,” Gus said, speaking as Gus. “And stay in character.”

  Elise sighed. She recomposed herself and sat up straight in the guise of Rebecca.

  “I have had a solemn warning and I know the meaning of it,” said Gus as the farmer. He said it again, slower and louder. He pulled his kerchief off, unable to continue.

  “What is it?” said Elise.

  “I really should get back to work,” said Gus.

  She nodded and got up quickly. He could tell she was upset by the way she walked. When something was bothering her, she took care to walk lightly, in such a way that her specially built shoe made no more noise on the floorboards than a slipper.

  Gus wanted to say he was sorry, but he had had a solemn warning, and it was not Elise to whom he should have been apologizing.

  But the next day Elise was still there when he got home and she helped him proofread by reading aloud (with great delight) the copy while he double-checked the spelling and grammar. He forgot all about the letters. A few nights later, they sat late on the porch as up and down the street his neighbors visited in front yards or strolled up and down the sidewalk, calling out one another’s names. Gentlemen tipped their hats. Everyone was smiling and no one was tipsy. He and Elise spoke of how refreshing it was to observe such street life, growing up as they both did in the country, with forests and a river for neighbors in his case, grassland and pasture and a stubby range of hills in hers. He told Elise of sounds he heard in the night: cutlery scraping plates, babies splashing in tubs, an icebox sucking shut.

  “I have heard clothes hangers banging together in someone’s closet.”

  “Do you fear loneliness?” she asked.

  He thought about it and decided that the image of empty hangers clanging together was a rather lonely one. Only the unfeeling, like his father, did not fear loneliness.

  Elise told him about the reason she rode blindly into the storm atop Sandy. At first Gus thought to shush her, lest he feel duty bound to report back to Mr. Starling, but her reasons—that she wanted Lorena to play with her because she was lonely, that Lorena’s insistence on a single “fact” was the beginning of what Elise called “the shift” in their lives—did not warrant a report.

  He had a house and two jobs and a fireplace that drew like a magnet. He had indoor plumbing and the cookstove was new. He had a wedding ring that was not doing anyone any good, hiding out in his underwear drawer.

  When they were engaged, Lorena would not mind at all if Elise taught piano lessons in the spare room. If he told her of the arrangement after he presented her with his mother’s ring and asked her to marry him, she would be thrilled, for she still felt guilty about what happened to Elise, and it seemed the meaning of the solemn warning was for Elise to come and live with them in the bungalow.

  After Elise left each night, he often went into the spare room and sat at the piano. He ran his fingers over the keyboard without pressing the ivory. Any sound he could get out of the instrument would not be music and would, he knew, make him feel things he did not want to feel. Elise had offered to teach him, but for some reason they never got around to it. She had offered again a couple of nights before he was to leave for Stillwater.

  When he told her he was going to Stillwater, he had looked at his feet.

  The next night he stayed late at the schoolhouse, finishing up the proofs for Mr. Starling, who did not care for the fact that Gus was going to see his sweetheart in Stillwater, until Gus let slip that he was going there to propose. Mr. Starling said, “Well, then, that changes the landscape considerably.” Gus had already turned in his edits when Mr. Starling added, along with another notice to readers who were in arrears, the following lines on the second page of the paper, which Gus did not read because (a) he had turned in his edits and (b) he was on a train to Stillwater when it came out.

  Gus McQueen, schoolmaster in Lone Wolf, left on the 8:37 for Stillwater, where he will visit with his fiancée, Lorena Stewart, of Gotebo Road, now enrolled at the university.

  When Gus got home that night, on the kitchen table was a note from Elise in which she admitted to stealing mint from a neighbor to make tea and suggested he speak to Lorena of their “business arrangement.”

  On the train the next morning, Gus took out Elise’s note from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and reread it. Lorena’s letters were in his bag, beneath his socks and underwear, but it was Elise’s short note that he reread. “Wherefore art thou” does not mean “where,” but I do mean “where,” even though it is hardly any of my business. The rest of the note—I waited for you because I thought we ought to discuss informing Lorena of our business arrangement. I have not written to her about it, as I thought I should speak first with you, and since you are going to Stillwater on the train, perhaps it would be better coming from you?—struck Gus as uncharacteristically rational. Everything about it sounded false. She was forcing herself to say something she felt she ought to say and her ambivalence was as obvious in the writing as Lorena’s love was in the music of her letters.

  Had they done something underhanded? Was it his fault? He was the one who was supposed to inform Lorena. And he would do so, after he gave her the ring that bulged in its purple felt box in the pocket of his trousers.

  Few women attended the university, and the platform in Stillwater was packed with college men waiting o
n their sweethearts. Gus had not even noticed all the young women in his car. The men, his age or younger, frowned at him as he exited his car, and he felt both lost and conspicuous until he heard his name and spotted Lorena farther up the track.

  After dropping his bag off at a rooming house near campus, they spent the afternoon kissing on a bench on campus. There were no trees to hide behind, and even though he knew no one in Stillwater except for Lorena, he felt exposed and a little embarrassed and was glad when it began to get dark out and he could claim to want supper. Lorena chose a restaurant staffed by Italians who sang and joked with one another as if the room were not filled with diners. Gus loved listening to the Italians far more than he liked being around the students, who made him feel self-conscious.

  “Aren’t you glad to see me?” said Lorena.

  “Of course.”

  “You appear reticent.”

  If he was going to marry her, he should share with her his innermost feelings. But when he told her that the students made him feel unworthy, Lorena said, “That’s ridiculous, Gus. Half of them are in the School of Education. You already hold the job that if they’re lucky they’ll get when they graduate. If anything, you should feel superior.”

  Gus smiled and nodded, as if he were being ridiculous, as Lorena had suggested, but he didn’t care to be told how he ought to be feeling. Hearing that he appeared reticent made him feel worse, so he searched his pockets for Mr. Starling’s fable about the farmer, which he had brought along to show her, thinking she’d love it as much as Elise did. Instead, he pulled out Elise’s note. Seeing what it was, he refolded it and stuffed it back in his pocket.

  “What was that?” Lorena asked.

  “I have something I want to show you from the paper if I can find it.”

  “It looked like Elise’s handwriting,” said Lorena.

  “Oh, it was. I mean, it is. I saw her the other day on the street and asked her if I might take piano lessons. I’ve always wanted to learn. She said she’d have to check her schedule and the next day she left me a note at the teacherage. I guess she wasn’t aware that I’d moved.”

  “How could she not know that? I would think, in Lone Wolf, it would have made the newspaper.”

  “Speaking of the newspaper,” said Gus, and he read aloud Mr. Starling’s fable, which he had finally located in the flap pocket of his jacket and which failed to distract her from her previous line of questioning.

  “What is Elise doing with her time if she’s not reading the paper?”

  “Who says she’s not reading the paper? She is most definitely reading the paper. We discussed this very article.”

  “So you’ve seen her?”

  “Yes. I told you I ran into her on the street.”

  “This is when you asked her about taking lessons?”

  “Why are we discussing this?” asked Gus. He felt awful for lying, but Lorena was scaring him. Gus had always known she was prideful, but it occurred to him, in the Italian restaurant with the waiters yelling and laughing at one another and the students ignoring everything but their plates of spaghetti and talk of the upcoming football game, that her pride would turn, in time, to righteousness. As she aged, she would be beset with rectitude.

  Gus thought of Aunt Mattie telling him that his mother had more to lose than anyone she’d ever met. He had never understood this as a good thing until now. Lorena had far less to lose than most, and considerably less than her sister.

  Lorena was talking and he leaned into hear her, but he heard only someone singing an aria.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “It’s too noisy.”

  “We have to pay the bill.”

  Gus put down a five.

  “That’s too much,” said Lorena. It was three times too much but worth it to Gus.

  He stood up and offered her his hand. They walked in silence down the streets, which were filled with male students. They were boisterous, clean, and tedious. Alongside them he felt reticent, dirty, and interesting.

  But he did not feel superior. He felt stuffed—with spaghetti, with the weight of his choice. The ring box bulged in his pocket and he took care to walk to Lorena’s left, lest she spot and ask about it.

  “You must be exhausted from your trip,” she said, sparing him from making excuses to return to his rooms. He wanted to be alone and she felt it. Could she feel other things? In front of the boardinghouse he kissed her goodnight, a chaste peck on her vaguely offered cheek.

  There were four bunks in his room and he was the first to bed. He lay awake listening to the men come in and loudly undress, their belt buckles banging against the floor as they lurched out of their pants. Soon they were snoring and belching, and the room smelled of sour beer breath. He had lied to Lorena about Elise and saw no way out of it without more lies. He did not think of himself as a liar, as he’d never had anyone to lie to except, of course, himself.

  In the morning, Lorena arrived for him properly at nine. He was waiting in the lobby and greeted her effusively. They had coffee and rolls in a cafe, then went on a tour of campus, teeming with excitement for the ball game. Lorena could care less about football, though Gus could tell that the experience of college required of her a certain investment in its rituals, and as a result, there was some giddiness mixed in with her obvious anxiety. She’d not forgotten the incident at the restaurant and he understood from all she did not say that it wasn’t the letter that upset her but his unwillingness to discuss it.

  She pointed out the science building, home economics. They were on their way to see the School of Education when it happened.

  But what happened? Gus was walking alongside Lorena, listening to her, asking questions, and then he was not walking. Something made him stop and stare.

  “What are you looking at?” she said.

  Gus suspected his father used to ask his mother the same thing when she stopped on the sidewalks to stare not into the storefronts but beyond them, beyond her life. Just like his mother, Gus could not answer. He could not say what he was looking at. A bush? The edge of a building? The shoes of passersby? He saw everything and nothing. He saw his choice and it was already made for him. Later, he would realize the choice was made the morning his aunt sat him down and told him all about his mother, for had she not, he would be married to Lorena.

  “I lied to you,” he said.

  “About Elise.”

  “Yes.”

  “Her letter?”

  “Yes. Well, not just that.”

  “You love her.”

  “Yes.”

  Lorena’s lips quivered, and then she smiled and nodded.

  “But nothing has happened. Between us, I mean. We have never even spoken intimately.”

  “But you love her.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she is the one you want to give that ring you’re carrying in your pants pocket, even though she has no finger for it?”

  Gus wanted to tell her what he’d been looking at: everything and nothing. He wanted to say he saw his choice and it was made for him. He wanted to tell Lorena about his aunt Mattie, sitting him down on his last day with her and telling him about his mother. But he said nothing.

  There were no tears and there was only one more question: Do you know your way back to the boardinghouse? She didn’t wait for the answer. She was walking away and then she was trotting and then running. He watched her until he was gone. Then he walked the other way, not knowing if it was the right way. He hadn’t been paying attention to where they were going. Gus hardly ever knew the way.

  PART TWO

  7

  ELISE STEWART

  Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, Fall 1917

  The night before Mr. McQueen was to leave for Stillwater to visit Lorena, he was late getting home from the newspaper. Elise got it in her head that he did not want her to be there when he arrived. So she stayed.

  She even made iced tea. She crushed up some mint stolen from the neighbor’s side yard and stirred it into the pitche
r. Why did he not want to see her? Perhaps he had bought Lorena a gift that wanted wrapping and he did not want her to see him attempt to wrap it, since it was well known that men could not wrap presents. They might as well put a gift in a gunnysack and toss it in your general direction.

  Finding Lorena’s unwrapped gift would require going through Mr. McQueen’s drawers and closets. Since she did this so routinely, she had high doubts that a search would turn up anything.

  She was getting hungry. In his icebox she found milk, butter, eggs. She could scramble them up a plate of eggs. But perhaps he had stopped off at Parson’s, the lone restaurant in Lone Wolf, for supper. Judging from the contents of his kitchen, Elise suspected he did this often. She doubted his knives could cut butter. She recalled his hacking away at a watermelon with his pocketknife the first time they all went to the river.

  Anyway, there was no apron. She couldn’t very well cook without an apron.

  Outside the shadows grew longer, the light softer. She decided to write him a note. She had planned to speak to him in person on a particular subject, the same subject she (pretending to be Lorena) had written him a letter about already. But she could not speak for Lorena. Time was, she felt the current of Lorena’s thoughts. They tumbled down out of her ears at night, filled the space between the cots.

  She could not speak for Lorena. Not anymore.

  Dear Mr. McQueen—

  “Wherefore art thou” does not mean “where,” but I do mean “where,” even though it is hardly any of my business. I made iced tea with purloined mint. All the tastier. I waited for you because I thought we ought to discuss informing Lorena of our business arrangement. I have not written to her about it, as I thought I should speak first with you, and since you are going to Stillwater on the train, perhaps it would be better coming from you?