Elise read this line over and thought to cross it out. But it was true and it made her cry.
She wrote but did not write: After all, Lorena forsook me the moment she let me leave your classroom.
Plus (she wrote but did not write), Were I the messenger, I would surely return even more maimed.
There was the question of a valediction. Sincerely was out of the question of course, unless she sought to make him disregard the contents of the entire letter. Surely he would not take her seriously if she closed with Sincerely. Yet there was nothing insincere about the note. It was only the word that was wrong, not what it meant.
Finally she settled on a dash, followed by the first letter of her first name. It felt familiar but casual. The dash suggested the note had been dashed off, rather than labored over for forty-five minutes, every second of which she listened for the sound of his feet on the porch boards.
When she arrived the next morning at Mr. McQueen’s house for her Saturday morning lessons, she saw that the note was not on the table where she left it. This meant one of several things, which she listed in her head while Miss Pruett was banging out her scales in a way that made Elise feel guilty for not suggesting she join the nuns.
He took it along with him to read on the train. He would read the lines and also in between them.
He threw it away! The notion threw her into such a panic she had to check all the wastebaskets immediately. She excused herself and told Miss Pruett to continue with her scales, then went from room to room, calling out vague encouragement. The baskets were free of waste entirely, which led Elise, somewhat settled, back to the piano stool and Miss Pruett.
He hid it in his sock drawer. This idea came to her with ten minutes left of Miss Pruett’s lesson. She thought of the stack of Lorena’s letters, which she’d discovered there, and imagined hers on top. But she did not want her words to mingle with Lorena’s. It was a matter of some concern, and Miss Pruett noticed, for she stopped playing.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course. Why?”
“You seem jittery.”
Jittery she was and would be until Miss Pruett was out the door and she was running her hands through balls of black and blue mostly ribbed socks.
“I’m afraid I had too much tea this morning,” said Elise. Then she cut the session short with a shamefully exaggerated appraisal of Miss Pruett’s progress.
“What do you know of the gentleman who lives here, this Mr. McQueen?” said Miss Pruett, lingering in the parlor.
“Why?” said Elise.
“Why?” Miss Pruett repeated, her tone suggesting Elise was the impertinent one.
“Yes, why.”
“I’m just wondering. I have heard him about when I’ve been here before, but I’ve not seen him and I have not heard him about at all today.”
“He’s away.”
“What is he like?”
“Beastly, actually.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, and unkempt. I have to arrive an hour early to make the place presentable.”
“That is disturbing.”
“My father is also unkempt. Many men are.” She said this as if it were something, like glissando, that Miss Pruett was unlikely to ever learn on her own.
“Not that part. The beastly part.”
“We have only a business arrangement,” said Elise.
“But he goes with your sister, correct? Are they not engaged?”
“They are not.”
“I understand that they are.”
“Take away the wind and the gossip and the wolf in Lone Wolf and you’d have only the lonely word ‘lone.’”
“So you plan on leaving?” said Miss Pruett, looking down at Elise’s special shoes.
“I am leaving,” she said. And as she said it, it became true.
“Not before I master Chopin, I hope.”
“I’d prefer to leave while I still have a tooth in my head and a halfway decent figure,” said Elise.
“I beg your pardon?”
“My sister is not engaged.”
“I am repeating what I read in today’s paper.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard anyone say,” said Elise. She had not read today’s paper, but she did not need to. She had pegged Miss Pruett as a snob and a fool but not a liar.
“You should stay away from tea altogether,” said Miss Pruett.
“I have another student,” said Elise.
Miss Pruett looked out the open screen door at the empty porch, the empty sidewalk beyond. The street was empty as well.
“Due any minute,” said Elise. “I have to prepare for him.”
Myra Lundquist strode into the yard, her pigtails swinging with purpose. She held her blue Number 2 piano primer (Miss Pruett was still on Number 1, which was bright red) against her chest like a shield.
“I mean her,” said Elise. “Saturdays are so busy, I get them mixed up.”
“It is true what they say about you,” said Miss Pruett.
“There comes a time, Miss Pruett, when in order to live with yourself you must submit to ruthless honesty.”
“You speak as if you know things, and yet you are a sixteen-year-old farm girl who I am told brought much grief to her family.”
“And what else am I?”
“Exceedingly rude?”
“You’re forgetting something.”
“Your skin is remarkably clear for a girl of your disposition.”
“Wrong, and wrong. I am owed, by you, for today’s lesson.”
“I feel as though I paid in advance for the month.”
“That was five weeks ago,” said Elise, though it was three.
“But surely it wasn’t.”
“We farm girls have nothing to do at night but cross the days off calendars given to us for free at the Feed and Seed store, which we frequent for the burlap to fashion our sack dresses.”
“Have I in some way upset you, Elise?” said Miss Pruett.
“Just put the money in an envelope and send it in the mail to me. I live on Gotebo Road. The postmaster knows me.”
“I can just bring it by and give it to Mr. McQueen.”
“Mr. McQueen is not my clerk.”
“But he is your sister’s fiancé? And the person who saved your life, as I understand it.”
“Goodbye now, Miss Pruett,” said Elise, opening the screen door. She yanked Myra’s hand free from her chest, pulling her inside while nudging Miss Pruett onto the porch. She took Myra to the piano and put her to work practicing her scales. In Mr. McQueen’s room, she closed the door. She put her head against it, shaky from her encounter with Miss Pruett. Engaged? She would know. He would have told her. She could no longer count on her sister, who was lost in the storm of Stillwater. She had been buried beneath chemistry, football, roommates, and cafeteria food. Elise and Mr. McQueen had ventured out into the storm to find her (on Sandy, of course, The Beatitudes being good for nothing but standing around waiting to inherit the earth.) Elise was the rider, Mr. McQueen the passenger.
Myra banged away proficiently on the scales. Excellent, Elise called through the closed door, with sincerity this time.
She plunged her hands into the sock drawer, her eyes shut. Balls of socks, wood beneath: no letters at all. What did it mean? He was the rider and she was the passenger. He had gone to rescue Lorena from the storm that was Stillwater. Elise would prefer to be buried in snow than football, roommates, food served on trays.
The next day Elise was hiding out in the hayloft, moving her eyes across the pages of Black Beauty, when Damyan rode up on his father’s plow horse.
Damyan wanted her to go to the river. She thought it over for two seconds and decided that any sort of distraction was welcome.
“You will have to ask my father.”
“To also go?”
“You will need to ask him if I can go. Specifically you will need to ask him if I can go with you.” Elise felt bad when she reali
zed she was shouting.
Elise’s father was fond of all the Bulgarians, who often helped him get in his crop when he was behind or shorthanded, which was frequent. Of course he agreed to Damyan’s accompanying his saturnine daughter to the river. He probably paid the boy to take her away, so distant and cross had she been since her encounter with Miss Pruett the day before.
Once on the dusty road, Damyan noticed her demeanor.
“What is wrong with you?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said. “Part of me has gone away. And yet I feel it returning.”
She hated the way she sounded—like Edith Gotswegon in the school play.
“Sometimes I understand the words of you but more when you are quiet,” said Damyan.
Well, why did you ask, she thought to say, but she was moved by Damyan’s claim to know her deeply, all the words, whether she said them or not. He knew about barbed wire. She had never asked him how he knew because she feared he would tell her.
In the distance, waving to them in the prairie wind, appeared the dusty trees lining the river.
“Do you miss trees? I assume there are trees in Bulgaria and that they are more or less similar to the ones that do not grow around here.”
“Yes, many trees. We lived on the forest. We ate the nuts from all the big trees and pulled berries from the ones that leave at the waist.”
“Bushes!” said Elise, as if she were taking a quiz.
“Mostly,” said Damyan.
“Did you come here to seek your fortune?”
“I come because my father put me screaming in the boat.”
“Yes, me too. Not a boat, a wagon. We were in Kansas for the railroad and apparently we went to Nebraska for corn, I don’t remember that, I was very young, and then we went back to Kansas and then we came here for the land, which father says is not as advertised. He thinks he was gypped. He has ideas about moving. Texas and silver mining, or Mississippi and chickens.”
“Is this the journey you said about earlier?”
“That’s another one,” said Elise.
They found a weeping willow free from couples and filthy-minded boys. Weeping willows were Lorena’s favorites. She drew them over and over when she was a child, until her mother made her start drawing teepees. Her mother was sad to begin with and all the weeping trees made her sadder.
Damyan spread a blanket and produced some sausages, bread, cheese, and wine. Elise declined the spirits. It did not run in her family as it did in Damyan’s.
“How is Blaguna?” Elise asked, but Damyan had gone off to change clothes. He had said he was going and she had heard him and yet she did not notice when he left. What is wrong with you, he had asked, and Elise realized this was the first grammatically correct sentence in his adopted English that she had ever heard out of his mouth.
“Are you also swimming?”
She looked up to see him, well proportioned in his suit. His part was imperfect, his lips full, his eyes, as always, damp with old-world want.
Elise remembered Mr. McQueen plucking the filthy-minded boy mimicking her walk and tossing him into the river. Would Damyan do this for her? He might club the boy in the head with his wine bottle. Damyan knew things Mr. McQueen did not. Mr. McQueen knew nothing of barbed wire and likely next to nothing about sausages.
“In a bit,” she said. “Maybe. Sit back down.”
Damyan leaned back on the blanket, which was of Kiowa origin and dirtier than the ground it covered. She recognized it from the abandoned sod house where she had spent many hours among the potatoes, carrots, and rotting hay, reading aloud from the newspaper. She thought of Mr. McQueen’s silly claim about the imperfections in Persian carpets. Were not magic carpets driven by Persians? Who cared if the pattern didn’t match? Similarly, who cared if the Kiowa blanket that covered the dirt was dirty?
Elise wanted to know what was in Damyan’s head, for she was weary of what was in hers, which was the perhaps not-so-secret engagement of Lorena and Mr. McQueen.
“When we were in school together,” she said, “and you looked out the window all the time?”
“Yes?”
“What were you primarily thinking about?”
Damyan took his time answering, which told her he was going to tell the truth. Thoughts required gathering. They were, if they were alive and breathing, like cattle spread across the plain. They needed herding up and bringing together.
“Mr. McQueen, when we would do the numbers, said of how they did not ever stop.”
“Infinity?”
“Yes. I used to think of the numbers as ladder into the sky. I could climb away.”
“Excellent. That’s what I thought you were thinking.”
“Sometimes of lunch.”
“Well, naturally.”
“And of going away in the train.”
On the train, not in it, Lorena would have said, though technically one got inside the train unless one was a hobo, which Damyan was probably not.
“Where were you thinking of going? To Chicago? There’s plenty work there. What sort of work would you like to do, Damyan?”
Damyan thought about it. He said he liked hats, and dogs. Equal, he added, by which she assumed he meant he liked them both the same.
“Do you think of yourself as an explorer?”
He looked confused.
“Never mind. Listen. I would like to go swimming, but I have to take off my shoes. I am just telling you because of my toes.”
“You do very well with the number of your toes in the world.”
Elise would have said, You do very well in the world with your number of toes, but she liked his way better, as it put her toes out there in the world. She was grateful.
“Thank you, Damyan. I believe that you believe so.”
“Why would I say if I did not believe it?”
He confirmed what Lorena had said and she did not want to believe about the Bulgarians—that they were, on the whole, terribly literal-minded.
“Well, sometimes it is enjoyable to say one thing and mean another.”
“Give the example.”
Elise thought of praising Miss Pruett’s wretched running of the scales the day before in order to buy time to rifle through Mr. McQueen’s wastebaskets. But that was not a good example because it wasn’t enjoyable. She couldn’t think of one.
“It’s complicated,” she said, grabbing the toe of her black shoe. “Off is coming the shoe now,” she said.
“Off with it, off!” said Damyan, which made her giggle for the first time in days.
The filthy-minded boys left her alone, Damyan being well proportioned in his suit. He swam vigorously with his head out of the water, like a dog wearing a hat. The river churned so much in his wake she was worried it might drain entirely. When he swam back to her, she suggested they float down the river and walk back up the path. Like most men, Damyan was a sinker, so he kept up by dog-paddling. Sandy could teach him not only various strokes but also proper technique of each, swimming being, in Sandy’s own words to her once, a technique-driven endeavor.
So were the negotiations she was called upon to do in life. For instance, fending off Damyan when they returned to the dirty blanket beneath the weeping willow. Elise liked Damyan’s combination of moony and brawny. She liked that, to look at him, you would have not a clue that in his head he was climbing a ladder of numbers. The technical aspect of fending him off called for what she dubbed Door Slightly Ajar. In other words, and to be blunt, she closed her eyes and kissed his full lips, which tasted of wine and sausage and, faintly, nuts gathered from the ancient forests of the Old Country.
But in her mind? A timetable, approximate of course, for the Rock Island Line. Mr. McQueen would be arriving home on the 7:20. The hour was approaching. She eased shut the door to Damyan.
“I must be home for supper.”
“It is only four of the o’clock.”
She needed to get into town to see Mr. McQueen. She would know with a glance whethe
r or not Miss Pruett’s lies were true.
“There is to be held a dance. The grange is to be holding it next Saturday,” said Damyan, dropping her off home.
She pointed to her foot.
“I believe you dance as you swim.”
It was a sweet thing to say even if its meaning was vague. It was not true. She was a terrible dancer even before her fateful journey.
“Would you like to soon come visit me in the old sod house where we used to?” he said.
It felt nice to be desired. But Elise thought she was too old to kiss among onions and potatoes and hay. She said yes because Door Slightly Ajar.
An hour later she had Buck saddled. She had a special makeup lesson, she told her parents. She was giving her father two dollars a week, ostensibly for the use of Buck, but in fact she was paying him to stay out of her business. Her father had never involved himself in her business until she secured a paying job, at which point he was full of ideas stemming from his stellar business acumen.
Miss Pruett was lying about the newspaper. If there were an announcement, would her parents not know? Her father, so mindful of getting ahead in life, would have something to say about Lorena marrying a schoolteacher. Also, Gus—Mr. McQueen—would have told her, since she had lately been helping him proofread the paper at nights.
Down the tracks, a mile east of town, she heard the whistle of the 7:20, though it was going on 7:37. What would he think when he saw her, waiting? His eyes would determine the truth for her. Words were a hindrance, bandages swaddling the perfectly healthy. Elise had known for years how words were blowing snow.
He stepped down off the train carrying a beat-up satchel and, slung over his shoulder, a canvas bag that reminded her of a mailman. She imagined the satchel was full of Lorena’s letters. In the canvas bag, among balls and balls of blue and black socks, was her note.
Mr. McQueen did not seem surprised to see her standing there.
Miss Pruett was a liar. Her lack of talent made her petty. A pity not even the nuns would take her. The man who got off the train was not engaged. Clearly he was disengaged.
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