Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  He made his way slowly to her and said, “I made a terrible mistake.”

  “Let’s walk,” she said. It is what you say when someone has made a terrible mistake. You want to ask questions—she had a dozen at the ready—but you hold off. Elise knew to hold off. This was the only thing she knew at the moment.

  “I heard your true cry,” he said. “In the storm. But I thought it was my dead brother. I wrote to my aunt and I told her my dead little brother, Leslie, had led me to you. And because my little brother had saved the life of Lorena’s little sister, I thought it was Lorena with whom—”

  “What did you tell Lorena?” said Elise. She had stopped walking. The train was steamy and whistling.

  “I told her.”

  “She’s always known,” Elise said, surprised that she said it aloud, to Gus. “She knew in the way my mother knows.”

  “There are different kinds of knowing, though.”

  “Persians of old left mistakes in their flying carpets because only Allah or God is perfect,” said Elise.

  “Are you trying to make me feel better?”

  She was trying to get him to stop telling her things she already knew.

  “I had a terrible row with Miss Pruett in your parlor.”

  “Who is Miss Pruett?”

  “She is no one, who claims you and Lorena are engaged.”

  They were walking alongside the train, filled with impatient passengers eager to put Lone Wolf behind them.

  “I told you I made a terrible mistake.”

  Elise stopped walking. She looked away from him, at the station. Its windows were streaked with coal dust and grime. Someone had tried to smear open a vista, but the effort to clean it up had further obscured it.

  “Well, at least she has a ring finger,” she said.

  Gus had pulled a box from his pocket. It was small, purple, felt. He said, “I made a terrible mistake and I am asking you to forgive me.”

  Elise was studying the grimy windows of the station. If she concentrated on cleaning them, perhaps she would not cry.

  “For what?” she said. “She is lovely, smart, shrewd, and she has what is abstractly referred to as a future, which actually means something quite specific.”

  “She said I ruined her life.”

  “She’s been sitting around waiting for her life to be ruined for some time.” But in fact, it was a fact that ruined Lorena: the particular saloon of which L. C. Ivent was proprietor. Had Lorena not challenged Elise on this insignificant point, everything would be different. They would have staged their play and Elise would have generously allowed her to fall from the hayloft onto a carefully placed pile of hay in a writhing death scene. Elise would not have embarked on her fateful journey, Sandy would not have been forced to leave (though he might have anyway, as he was an explorer), and Mr. McQueen would not have heard her true cry.

  “We will have to go away.”

  “I see that you are packed already. And of course she has at her disposal a splendid steamer trunk, though not the clothes to fill it.”

  “No, I mean us. You and me. We can’t stay in Lone Wolf.”

  Elise looked at the ring box. He held it in his palm, an offering.

  “What are you saying? It was in the paper.”

  “What was in the paper?”

  “News of your engagement.”

  “That is the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life.”

  That is what she had said. “Miss Pruett is mean and uppity, but is she a liar?”

  “Who is Miss Pruett, and yes, she is a liar if she said news of my engagement was in the paper. Did you not read the paper?”

  “For once in my life, no, I did not.”

  She couldn’t very well tell him that after Miss Pruett’s visit she could barely make it out of the hayloft until Damyan came along and distracted her with a trip to the river.

  “Well, then, we will go get one and I will prove to you that this Miss Pruett is as you described.”

  Elise was looking at the box he held in his hand: small, purple, felt, and obviously not brand new.

  “It was my mother’s,” he said finally.

  “And you were going to give it to my sister.”

  “Does that mean you don’t want it?”

  “It?” she said. “Do you mean the ring I have no finger for?”

  “It doesn’t matter which finger, Elise. That’s just a custom. You don’t care about such things. And the ring is only a symbol.”

  “I don’t care about symbols any more than I care about customs.”

  “So, no?”

  “Why are we discussing ‘it’? Are you not offering me more than a symbol customarily worn on some arbitrarily chosen appendage?”

  “I am offering you myself.”

  “Then get to it,” she said.

  Gus got down on one knee. A porter pushing along a cart loaded with boxes tipped his hat and smiled.

  “I know the circumstances have been difficult to say the least,” he said in a grave voice. “I realize that my prospects are not—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Elise. “I’m not Edith Gotswegon. I don’t care about prospects and I’d prefer you to look me in the eye.”

  Gus hoisted himself up slowly. He straightened himself out with the creakiness of a man who has disembarked from a train more disengaged than engaged.

  “I find myself confused,” he said.

  “Well, I can’t imagine why. You have been so clear of late.”

  “You are going to make me pay.”

  “Do you think you deserve to pay? Just a little?”

  Gus said, “I have been looking over my shoulder for weeks. Since you went into the hospital. I thought someone was following me. I have been seeing and hearing things.”

  Elise, despite herself, was engaged.

  “What things?”

  “My brother. I heard his voice. Or I thought I did. It was you, actually.”

  So she sounded like his dead brother? Was that what he was saying?

  “What else?”

  “My mother. I thought she was behind my stopping and staring. But I stopped not because of her but because of you.”

  Now Elise was confused. Still, she wasn’t uninterested.

  “Everywhere I went with Lorena, I thought we were being trailed. I am sure I drove her mad.”

  “Not the kind of mad you’re referring to. But yes, I’m sure.”

  “It was you,” he said. “Your shadow.”

  The train pulled away, revealing Oklahoma. It was endless and muted, but if you knew not where to look, as much as how, you could see, in the distance—as Elise did at that moment—the villages of prairie dogs, hidden in the wind-ruffled grasslands. There were windmills, stock tanks, even awnings over porches.

  “We have to go away?” said Elise.

  “Yes. We can’t stay here now.”

  “Can we go to Texas? Father has decided to become a miner of silver and I want to be close to Mother.”

  “Of course. Wherever you want. And we can take the piano and wherever we end up, you can teach lessons.”

  “No, we can’t. It doesn’t belong to us.”

  She liked saying “us,” even if it meant losing her piano, which she planned on taking, despite what she said. The Women of the Church did not need it. She imagined loading the wagon after nightfall, sneaking out of town, the strings of the piano singing out as the wagon bumped over dry creek beds on a night lit by a high prairie moon.

  But there was her sister to think about. Now and for the rest of her life.

  “I suppose Lorena hates me now.”

  “No. I told her we had never even spoken intimately.”

  “That would be a lie.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You have forgotten your visit to the hospital that day?”

  “I said nothing that would qualify as intimate.”

  “Your business about the Natchez Trace would qualify as intimate.”

>   “In what way?”

  “Prehistory,” she said.

  “If I follow you, which I do not always, and it is for some reason fine that I don’t, you are saying that I was talking about something else?”

  “Poor Charlie Carter! His Beulah girl left him high and dry. He slept his drunken slumber through three whole states! You felt his suffering. I saw it in your eyes when you looked at me. It embarrassed you not to acknowledge it. You got down on your knees and you begged my mercy.”

  Mr. McQueen laughed, but his laughter, though not soft, seemed in danger of dead-ending in hiccups, then tears. “Telling her was the hardest thing,” he said. “And yet I know it was right.”

  He took her arm then. Not here, not right out in public, some part of her tried to protest, but it was outdated and easily outvoted.

  8

  GUS MCQUEEN

  Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, Spring–Summer 1918

  Three weeks before school let out for the summer, Gus went to the office of Mr. C. H. Griffith to resign his job. Elise’s parents were about to leave for Texas. Mr. Stewart was to make his fortune mining silver in a place called Shafter, but Gus and Elise were planning on settling in a town some sixty miles north called Fort Davis. A drummer passing through Lone Wolf had praised its beauty and left a copy of the local paper, which both Gus and Elise read cover to cover, searching for the news between the lines of fading ink. They liked the pictures of the chiseled hills and the high stretching desert beyond. They liked its proximity to Mexico. Both had dreamed of visiting other countries, and a grand tour of Europe seemed out of the question, given that they’d married at the office of the justice of the peace with only Elise’s parents in attendance.

  Lorena was invited to the wedding but wrote to her mother to say she was too busy with her schoolwork. Elise had suggested waiting until summer so that Gus’s aunt Mattie could come, but Gus thought it best, given the circumstances, to go ahead with the ceremony.

  ‘We can go see Aunt Mattie later,” he said.

  “On our honeymoon?” Elise said.

  “Of course. We’ll take the train. You would love Aunt Mattie. When she is fed up she says, ‘My land!’ I’ve never not seen her in her apron. Also, when I think about her corn pudding, my knees buckle.”

  A reception was held at the home of the bride. In attendance were two out of the three brothers Bulgarian. Damyan was absent, and Elise, when Gus asked her about it, was cagey. He resolved to follow up, but in fact it mattered not at all to him that only two out of three of the Bulgarians seemed to have come for the refreshments and that the bulk of the attendees were Mr. Stewart’s idea men. He was stuck talking to, or rather listening to, the idea men for most of the reception. Elise talked to the Bulgarians, who stuffed squares of chocolate Texas sheet cake into their mouths and, when they left, into the pockets of their jackets. Maybe they were taking it home for Damyan, who Gus decided was ill. Then he gave no further thought to Damyan, eager as he was to take Elise home to the bungalow and proceed with marital relations.

  “I have heard that people find pleasure from having their toes licked,” said Elise when they were home in the bungalow. They had stripped without reservation, shame, modesty, embarrassment, haste, or zeal. They had just gone home and put down their things and walked into the bedroom and taken off their clothes as if they were hanging up their wraps in a mudroom in winter.

  Now they were naked and hugging each other by the bureau. Gus’s excitement was obvious and barely containable. He remembered all those nights, staring across the river at the other side, all those nights of not crossing, savoring the deliciousness of denial. Was that a good thing? Was he a good person? He couldn’t believe he was thinking these things while in a naked embrace with his wife of five hours.

  “Who told you that about the toe licking?”

  “One hears things.” She seemed embarrassed to have learned about or even talked about sex, but she did not seem the least embarrassed about the fact that she was about to commit it.

  “I have heard things too and I would like to try them all,” said Gus.

  “I won’t ask where you heard them because I am not Edith Gotswegon and also because this is why,” she said, and she kissed him. They knew how to kiss. They had kissed plenty and in many ways, which had come to them naturally. It had felt different than with Lorena. With Lorena it sometimes went on a bit and with Elise it never ended. That is how he knew it was right. If you grow tired of kissing and want supper at an Italian restaurant among the raucous college students and waiters singing off-key arias, you know that you have made a mistake.

  One thing Gus could never quite believe about that first time was how long he managed to last. When he finally came, he was atop Elise, and her head was hanging off the side of the bed and her arms were splayed out against the walls. Palms against the plaster, elbows locked, she was braced, but barely. It was not the look on her face, combined with the odd angle, which he would never forget. It was not the way she had gone rigid, then slack. When he finished, he cradled the crown of her dangling head and it was the cradling he would always remember. He spread out his fingers. With his hand he made a basket. Her head in the basket of fingers, he lifted it up to his lips.

  “Stop smiling,” he said, for it was time to kiss. But she didn’t stop smiling, so he kissed her smile until he was smiling. They took a bath. The day slipped away in slanted light, which quivered on the claw feet of the tub and on all five of Elise’s toes, propped up by the spigot. Soon it was dark. Neighbors called their children and their dogs in for the night. Elise noted the similarity of the names of pets and children in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma. Gus thought to say that it was general all over but did not, for everything that was happening in the world was happening only in that bathtub.

  A month later, down at the First National Bank of Lone Wolf, Mr. C. H. Griffith received Gus as if he vaguely remembered him, but the look on his face—as close to a smirk as a gentleman banker can display—suggested he knew everything that had happened to Gus since he’d last seen him. Gus decided to see if Mr. Griffith was such a liar as to feign surprise, but after telling him he was now with Lorena’s sister, Elise (he left out the fact that they’d married, as it was in the newspaper), Mr. Griffith said, “Lone Wolf is a small town, Mr. McQueen.”

  He was looking at Gus in that way older men often looked at him, as if he’d incorrectly knotted his tie or were wearing socks that clashed with his trousers.

  “So you went with the one who was maimed?”

  “She was injured,” Gus said, bristling at the word “maimed,” though Elise herself often used it. “She lost some toes to frostbite.”

  “And a finger?”

  “Yes.”

  “The older sister is certainly stout.”

  He seemed to be speaking about livestock. Knowing nothing of livestock, Gus saw no reason to respond.

  “Dr. Hall told me your aunt was your guardian,” he said.

  Was she his guardian? Had she been declared so by a court of law? If so, no one had bothered to tell him, though he didn’t see what difference it would make.

  “She was far more than my guardian.”

  “And your father?”

  “He moved away to find work after my mother and brother died. He has another family now.”

  “I gather, then, that Dr. Hall served as a sort of father figure to you in your formative years.”

  “Perhaps he feels so,” Gus said, horrified by the thought.

  “No doubt he did try.”

  “Yes,” he said, because he was not raised to run a man down in front of his friend.

  “You’re grown and obviously free to marry whomever you want. But perhaps I might fill in here for Dr. Hall, who so graciously filled in for your father. It is my opinion, Mr. McQueen, that your first choice was the better.”

  “And why is that? Because she is stout?”

  “By stout, I meant she possesses vigor. I wasn’t referring to her waistline. Though she ha
s a fine figure, as far as I can recall. She has beauty and intelligence and drive. She got herself out of Lone Wolf to attend college. For women, that is rare. But that is not all.”

  “Oh?”

  “The younger girl. Why is it that she wandered off on her horse during the worst blizzard we’ve had in years?”

  Gus figured Mr. Griffith knew the answer to this, or some ridiculous lie told by the likes of Edith Gotswegon or another student, far more damning than researching a fact for a play.

  “I think the point we all ought to remember is that her life was spared.”

  “Yes, the good Lord intervened. She could easily have frozen to death. I am sure that you established a special bond with both girls during that experience. But I have heard that it left the younger girl . . . well, I don’t know how to say this, Mr. McQueen, but to say it. I hear she is a bit touched.”

  “Touched?”

  “I have been told that she believes her horse, the one that had to be put down after her rescue, to be alive and performing tricks in a Mexican circus.”

  Gus couldn’t help himself. He laughed, mostly over the fact that such a statement would make its way around Lone Wolf, dead-ending at the First National Bank.

  “This may be entertaining now, but over the long haul? I just urge you to consider that her condition, which perhaps you think is only temporary, because of the trauma she suffered, will grow worse. I have heard that the mother herself suffers similarly.”

  “Her mother lost two boys to typhoid.”

  “Yes. Many children were lost. You could call it an epidemic.”

  “Everyone grieves differently,” Gus said. “There is no handbook, let alone blueprint.”

  “Ah, but there are both,” he said. “I lost a son myself. I read the Bible nightly, attended church regularly, and adhered to a regimen here at work, which is not unlike a blueprint.”

  “I am sorry for your loss but glad to hear you got over it so swimmingly.”

  Mr. Griffith was too busy speechifying to notice Gus’s tone.

  “People love to claim you never get over such things. And, on the one hand, it is true. There remains always a place in your heart for those you’ve lost. But at a certain point you must honor God and the living. You get over your loss to the extent that you can carry on with your life, that is, if you follow the proper guidelines.”