Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

  “Have you a term for those hills?” I pointed to a ridge, so flat it resembled a mesa.

  “Shelf,” said Isaac.

  “And what differentiates it from a mesa?”

  “Whether you’re talking to a Mexican or a white man.”

  I knew many foreign terms that had been adopted by Americans, but I knew better than to point this out, as I was aware of the limits of what interested Isaac. I knew him to have an interest in geology—at least he could talk for more than a minute on the subject or rocks—so I asked him what caused it to be so flat.

  “The Lord God might be able to tell you. I imagine it was here when my great-grandfather came from England.”

  He looked over his shoulder at me. “Where do your people come from?”

  I thought to say Bulgaria, just to see his reaction. But I never lied to him. The things I did not tell him were things I did not fully know to say. If a thing is half-formed inside you, not even what my father might call an idea, there is no point in making it known. Half the things my sister said did not bear mention, since they made no sense to anyone aside from herself and the person I was once.

  “Ohio and Pennsylvania,” I said.

  “And before that?”

  “Scotland, I believe,” I said, though they might well have been Irish. I would later learn that Isaac had a low opinion of the Irish, though he was kind enough not to share this with me at my wedding, attended almost entirely by the O’Connellys.

  “And your father, you say he was a farmer?”

  He knew so little about me. I could make myself up to him. Was it not why I had come west? It wasn’t because of Gus McQueen or my sister. I had envisioned a certain life for myself and it did not happen and I came west on a train and now I was married to Isaac. When I thought of it like that, it seemed as irrefutable as Isaac’s beloved Gospels.

  “After a fashion,” I said.

  Isaac nodded.

  “Corn?”

  “Cotton.”

  “Ah,” he said, which meant either he had a firm opinion about a subject or he did not know the first thing about it and was not interested.

  “And your mother’s people, were they Scotsmen as well?”

  “Some were undoubtedly Scotswomen.”

  We had dismounted and were down by the pond in the draw. The horse was drinking and nearby, cows swatted flies with their tails. My clothes were dusty and I was standing by my husband. I studied him in the flat afternoon light. I had chosen him, but I knew that you hardly ever make such choices with all of yourself. Parts of you vote by proxy, if at all. What parts of me wanted Isaac?

  Isaac’s gaze was fixed on his cattle, or beyond—I could not tell because I looked up at the sky. It was not and would never be a blanket. It was a light blue sheet tautly stretched and endless overhead. Everything beneath it belonged to my husband. Did I belong to him?

  “I am going to make a choice,” I told him.

  “Between?”

  “Your being a stranger to me and your not being a stranger to me.”

  He looked at me as if he expected me to say this, as opposed to, say, whether to have stew or steak for dinner. He looked at me like he knew me. Then he said, “You’re thirsty?” As if my comment were a symptom that might be easily cured by fetching a flask of water from the saddlebag.

  I did not mind. There was a lot to be said for such attentiveness. But it’s not exactly right to say there’s a lot to be said about it, for if it’s right—if it feels right—why say anything at all?

  It wasn’t long after that day that I borrowed a horse one morning when Isaac and his crew had taken a wagon loaded with posts to some far part of the ranch to mend fence. I paid a visit to the schoolhouse eight miles away, which served the children of ten or twelve ranches.

  I have heard it said that a roof is 90 percent of the health of a good structure. By that standard, the schoolhouse was on its last gasp. Many of the shingles had been blown away by the wind. There was a lone outhouse and a pump in the schoolyard. The children had brought their lunches in pails and lined them up beneath their wraps in the coatroom. On pegs hammered into a board hung twelve tin cups, each with a name written on it, though there were only seven children present the day I visited.

  The teacher was a young woman who came up from Gillette. She bunked in the teacherage Sunday night through Thursday. She had a gentleman in the mines down in Gillette, and she did not hold school on Friday on account, she said, of his getting paid. She had to be there to take his money lest he spend it all in the saloon before she made it home. I thought to say that he sounded like quite a catch, but I felt for the girl. She appeared overwhelmed. I spent some time with her, questioning her about the curriculum, observing her teach. She was clearly unsuited for the position—I knew good teaching, as I had been subject, in Lone Wolf, to its opposite—and it did not take long to see that she was planning on leaving.

  Isaac was in the barn when I returned home. I had gotten a later start than planned, and the sun was low enough to backlight the grass, wind-rippled in the pastures.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  I told him about the young teacher. I described her incompetence and said I would be taking over for her when school started back in the fall. He was tinkering with the wagon trace and did not look up.

  “If you are going to borrow a man’s horse, you’ll need to put it up proper.”

  “I planned on doing just that.”

  He would not look at me. “He’ll need grooming and turning out a bit before you put him back in the stall.”

  “I grew up on the back of a horse,” I said. “I know how to take care of a horse. I need my own horse, so I will not have to borrow one.”

  He got up and fetched a tool. He was upset, but it wasn’t about the horse.

  It took two days for him to confront me, which was typical for Isaac. He was not so much a brooder as someone who waited to say what he needed until he had the words to say it. He said it at night, when we had just gone to bed.

  “About this teaching.”

  “You are against it.”

  “There is plenty to do around here. More than enough for one person. I worry you’ll run yourself ragged trying to do both.”

  But that wasn’t the reason and I knew it.

  “I imagine there will be times when the weather may necessitate my staying over in the teacherage.”

  I said this to provoke him and it worked.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because I am a teacher.”

  “I thought that was over and done.”

  “So you were looking to marry a former schoolteacher? Or a retired one?”

  “I can support us. It’s my job to provide.”

  “This is not about twenty dollars a month.”

  “What, then?”

  “I told you. I am a teacher. You knew that when you married me. In fact, I seem to recall that you married me because I am a teacher.”

  “It’s true I was looking for an educated woman to spend my life with. But I married you because you are you. And you are the one for me. There’s not but one and you’re it.”

  That there is one of me and I am “it” certainly seemed inarguable.

  He patted the sheets between us. “I want to wake up every morning with you right here. A little closer’d be even better.”

  It was perhaps his most tender moment to date. It was enough for me to change my mind. I did not set foot in that schoolhouse until the day I took my firstborn up to enroll him.

  My decision to stay on the ranch did not mean I adjusted easily to what I will call its hardships. Isaac kept a shotgun by the door and another in the barn. I noticed it the day I arrived and had in mind to ask why, but the next morning, as I was washing up after breakfast, I heard a blast. I ran to the door, expecting to see cattle rustlers surrounding the house, only to find Isaac nosing the barrel of his gun up under a rattlesnake almost as long as I am tall. He spied me watching and smiled.
The snake twitched and he tossed him into the yard and shot him again. He had been on his way to the outhouse, beneath which (he thought to tell me after this incident) a “mess” of snakes made their home.

  “Sometimes one will make it inside the privy,” he said when I came out into the yard to look at the snake. “Doesn’t happen often. Still, you should always wear boots, especially at night, and shine your lantern in the corners.”

  “Have you thought about relocating the outhouse?”

  “I’ve heard it said that if you kill the alpha male, the others will get gone. I might have taken care of the situation,” he said, pointing the barrel of his gun toward the snake that lay still now in the weeds.

  “That would be an awfully convenient thing to happen on my second day.”

  “You’re bringing us good luck.”

  But luck had nothing to do with the abundance of snakes on that ranch. I had grown up in rattler country, but in my first month on the ranch I saw more of them than in my prior twenty years. Then there were the stories. The worst I heard, told by a ranch hand named Jed one night at the dinner table, was about an older woman who lived on a nearby ranch, a Mrs. Weatherspoon. One evening she was knitting a sweater for her baby when the baby woke in need of feeding. She laid her yarn down and went to tend to the infant. When she came back to her chair, she reached down to retrieve her yarn and grabbed instead a rattler coiled up alongside it.

  “All she seen was a ball, I reckon,” said Jed.

  “What was her name again?” I asked.

  “Weatherspoon.”

  “The name sounds made up.” I said this only because I suspected the hands were trading tall tales to terrorize me, though Jed was my favorite among the hands, as he often said things that surprised me.

  “Aren’t all names made up? Those that don’t come from the Bible, of course,” he said, looking at Isaac. “I mean, somebody somewhere had to make them up. God don’t just up and assign you a last name, does he, Mr. Nelson?”

  Isaac looked at me and smiled.

  That Jed had a point, and that it had never occurred to me, made me blush.

  “I believe she is suggesting the story itself is made up,” Isaac said to Jed, though I could tell by the delight in his eyes whose side he was on.

  “Well, should you want to pay the lady a visit, you might ask to shake her right hand. She’s missing two fingers on her left.”

  “My sister lost a finger to frostbite,” I said, without thinking. “And four toes. That was on her right foot. She lost another toe on her left.”

  “Gracious,” said Isaac. “How did this happen?”

  “She wandered off in a blizzard. The horse she was riding had to be put down.”

  “Where did this happen?” asked Jed.

  “Oklahoma.”

  “I wasn’t aware you could get frostbit that far south.”

  “It gets quite cold in southwestern Oklahoma. But if you are suggesting that my story is made up,” I said, “you can go to a town in the western part of Texas I have forgotten the name of and look up my sister. If it is fair out, she will be going without shoes, because she has always hated wearing shoes, but if she is wearing shoes, you can look to her left hand to see she’s missing her ring finger. While you are there, you should also observe the tip of her nose.”

  “I believe you, ma’am,” said Jed, at which point I realized that I might have sounded a bit defensive. I felt bad, because I liked Jed. Isaac was particular about his help. He preferred God-fearing men, but churchgoing cowboys were hard to find. He had a pronounced bias against Indians because, he said, once they take a single draft of alcohol they are ruined for life. I had a hard time believing such a thing being true of an entire race of people, but then the only Irish hand he’d kept around more than a couple of weeks was Jed, whose parents both died young from drink and the general misery and public embarrassment that accompanies it, leaving him to never touch a drop. According to Isaac, all the other Irish hands had lasted less than a month before they showed their true sodden colors.

  I was expected to feed the hands except on the weekends, when they ate in their bunkhouse. If at first I longed for female company and tired of talk of cattle and fencing and weather, in time I got used to the men and thought of them as I once had my students. I even considered tutoring them at night and brought it up with Isaac, but he said if his men had enough energy to attend school at night, he had not worked them hard enough. From this I surmised that an educated woman appealed to him but that he had little use for educated men.

  A couple of days later, Isaac said, “Does she get along all right without her toes, your sister?”

  “Last I heard.”

  “When was it you heard last from her?”

  “Such questions,” I said.

  “Do you not think it wise to let your family know where you are?”

  “I told you the story,” I said, referring to my sister marrying my former fiancé.

  “You did. But I don’t see how your parents are to blame for the actions of your sister and this schoolteacher scoundrel.”

  “You think I should invite them out for a visit?”

  “Lorena,” he said. He so rarely spoke my name that I stopped what I was doing—chopping onions, I believe, for I was near to tears—and turned to him.

  “I lost both my parents the same year. Within weeks of each other. Don’t a day go by—”

  “Doesn’t,” I said. “Or you could say, conversely, ‘Not a day goes by.’”

  “Don’t a day go by,” he said, “that I don’t miss them.”

  “Mine were of a different ilk, Isaac.”

  “Blood kin still.”

  He was a good man and sometimes I resented the goodness in him.

  It took us several years to have children. I will say that it was not for lack of trying, and I will add that in my opinion it is only loose girls who get pregnant on their first trip to town. At some point, Isaac thought the Lord was punishing us. But for what? Isaac did nothing wrong but deprive me of a horse (for a time) and forbid me to teach his ranch hands. In the scheme of sins and faults, that was not enough for even Isaac’s vengeful God to deprive us of offspring.

  My first child, a boy, was born the sixth winter after my marriage, in 1926. We called him Isaac Newton Nelson Jr.

  The term confinement, used in the context of pregnancy, was certainly applicable to that first pregnancy. It began to snow in mid-October. By late February, when Isaac Junior was born—assisted by a neighbor lady, Mrs. Pedersen, an inexhaustible if dour woman witness to dozens of births (she claimed to have brought Isaac Senior into the world, though Isaac claims he doesn’t remember seeing her in the room)—I had not been out of the house since Christmas.

  Mrs. Pedersen was of the bed-rest school. I suppose it made sense. Women often died in childbirth. I was to lose two children before my daughter, Elena May, was born three years later, when I was nearly thirty. And even though neither child did I carry to term, I mourned them as if I’d held, nursed, and loved them for years. I gave them names, which I never shared with Isaac. I did not share everything with Isaac, especially my fears, for I did not care to be told—again—to put my trust in the Lord. I had come to put trust in him with a consistency that surprised me, but my faith, steadfast as it was, did not prevent me from feeling.

  It is comforting, for some, to put all one’s trust in a higher order. I do not care to relinquish all control, especially over my emotional life. Therefore I have cobbled together some system of belief in the way a bird makes her nest from whatever is at hand: the obvious and failsafe materials provided by nature (straw, leaves, grass, twigs) and the happened-upon, the found (twine, a strip of shredded rubber from an inner tube, the tip of one finger of a cast-off glove.) Sometimes, when Isaac speaks to me of how I ought to put my trust in the Lord to see me through this, that, or the other, I picture his nest, so expertly woven from only what God delivers—the fruits of nature—and I judge it the weaker for not m
aking use of what scavenged trash might fortify it. Is it that I came late to the Lord and lack the inner strength and habit to trust only in his straw, his grass, his twigs, or am I only making it my faith so that, patchwork though my nest may be, it works for me?

  But, when Elena came along three years after Isaac, I had less and less time to grapple with such questions. I had heard other women say that only when they became mothers themselves did they understand their own mother. My reaction is, When did you find time to contemplate your mother’s character? I was kept busy raising my children and keeping house in a place so remote and inhospitable that the longer I stayed there, the more I wondered if it was ever meant to be settled.

  Once I made the mistake of saying as much to Isaac, who told me to think of Canada—an entire country above us, and much of its southern regions populated and cultivated. I bit my tongue to keep from telling him that I did not think I was alone in the world in never thinking, when the temperature dropped below zero and what on the Oklahoma prairie we used to call the coyote winds began to howl, of Canada.

  As difficult as the winters were, the dry summers were no respite. There was so little rain that a garden was impossible. I found I could grow only a patch of rhubarb along the side of the house, placed so that it might receive the runoff from the roof should a storm materialize, but mostly I nursed it alive with dirty dishwater, saved in a pail.

  So many summer days I spent watching the children play through the kitchen window. They were to stay within my sight, for I worried constantly that they would step on a rattler. Isaac, obviously, had not killed the “alpha male.” As soon as the snows melted and the sun turned the yard to dust, I would hear the shotgun blasts, sometimes several times a week. The hands were in the habit of severing the rattlers and giving them to Isaac Junior as toys. I took them away from him and put them in a cookie tin, which he was allowed to shake but not open. The skins they stripped and hung on the fence to dry before tanning them. Then they would take them to a cobbler in town and have him cover their boots with the awful patterns. It was a mystery to me why anyone would want to look down and see the skin of that most vile and fearsome of serpents I scoured the ground in order to avoid.