Prairie Fever Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL PARKER

  Hello Down There

  The Geographical Cure

  Towns Without Rivers

  Virginia Lovers

  If You Want Me to Stay

  Don’t Make Me Stop Now

  The Watery Part of the World

  All I Have in This World

  Everything, Then and Since

  Prairie Fever

  a novel by

  MICHAEL PARKER

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2019

  For my sisters:

  Edith Ann Parker

  Hallie Stewart Parker

  Today the grass sings when I speak of love.

  —HERTA MÜLLER, THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS

  Contents

  Part One

  1 Elise Stewart

  2 Gus McQueen

  3 Lorena Stewart

  4 Gus McQueen

  5 Elise Stewart

  6 Gus McQueen

  Part Two

  7 Elise Stewart

  8 Gus McQueen

  9 Elise Stewart

  10 Lorena Stewart

  Part Three

  11 Gus McQueen

  12 Lorena Nelson

  13 Elise McQueen

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  1

  ELISE STEWART

  Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, January 1917

  Winter mornings their mother kissed them both on the forehead, pinned the blanket around the two of them, and slapped the horse’s croup. Lorena held the reins. Elise wrapped her arms around her older sister’s waist and both girls shut their eyes against the icy wind of the prairie.

  On the way to school they recited items memorized from the pages of the Kiowa County News, with accompanying commentary.

  Elise: Alfred Vontungien left Lone Wolf to attend O.U. Norman. He is one of our most brightest and most promising young men. Good luck to you, Alfred, in your studies.

  Lorena: Good luck, Alfred, outrunning the cow that licks your hair up to five times a day.

  Elise: Burr Wells, who owns one of the best farms that ever a crow flew over, says he has a set of farmers this year who are farmers in fact. He can’t hardly get through praising his farmers.

  Lorena: It is a fact that farmers come in sets.

  Inside the blanket, they warmed themselves with words. The horse knew the way to the schoolhouse through the blinding snow. The teacher would be looking out for them. He would struggle into his coat and gloves and hat and come outside to unpin them. Off would fall the blanket, coated with ice crystals. Out would fall the words memorized from the newspaper. The teacher would shake the blanket, and the words from the newspaper would fall to the ground. The other words, not written, their words, along with their giggles, would float off into the snow.

  Lorena: While moving a cultivator plow last week near Gotebo, Eli Roberts was struck by the tongue of the machine, cutting an ugly gash under his chin and hurting him severely. The wound was dressed and he is getting along nicely. Roberts now has it in for everything with a long tongue.

  Elise: Edith Gotswegon of Lone Wolf has been placed at the top of the list of long-tongued things he has it out for.

  Lorena: In for, not out for.

  Elise: In or out for.

  Lorena: Chapman Huff had business in Oklahoma City.

  Elise: I bet he did, did Chapman Huff.

  Lorena laughed. Through the blanket, Elise saw her laughter leak out and lessen the menace of the wind. When the teacher, who was new that year, unpinned the blanket, Elise saw the comma separating the dids disappear in a puff of snow. “I bet he did did,” she whispered to Lorena, and the new schoolteacher whose name was Mr. McQueen, shook his head and said, “You two!” as he helped first Lorena and then Elise off the horse.

  On the first day they arrived by blanket, Mr. McQueen asked what their horse was called. They had been riding him to school every day for months, but now that Mr. McQueen had to unpin them he wanted to greet the horse by name.

  “His name is Sandy,” said Elise.

  Mr. McQueen looked distressed. Elise assumed it was because Sandy was the color of tar.

  “He would like to live by the sea. He does live by the sea, I mean. He gallops through the tidal pools.”

  “I see,” said Mr. McQueen, who seemed to have recovered. He introduced himself properly to Sandy and asked if he might accompany him to the shore. He had come from somewhere back east and Elise assumed he knew the ocean, but when asked during geography, he said he knew only rivers. He described crossing the Mississippi by train on his way west. He crossed at Vicksburg, where boys stood by the river in knickers stiff with mud. For a nickel, these boys would tie ropes around their waists and wade into the river and stick their hands into holes in the bank and pull out catfish. He told the story of a man named Charlie Carter who sat beside him for three states snoring drunk. Finally, in Arkansas, he woke up calling for his Beulah girl. All the boys and most of the girls thought this was hilarious, but Elise found it tragic. His Beulah girl having married another. Charlie Carter having drunk himself into a three-state slumber, so sick was he over the events that had befallen him. Oh Beulah girl, cried Charlie Carter.

  Elise sat in the middle of the classroom, studying Mr. McQueen. With her most woeful expression she implored him to understand Charlie Carter’s predicament. Have you nothing in your body but funny bone? Mr. McQueen caught her staring. He returned her stare as he talked of the Natchez Trace, which he claimed to be a path of prehistoric animals before Indians found it and then white men. He talked on a bit and then he called on her.

  “Reverend Womack closed the meeting at Bethel Sunday early due to heavy rains,” said Elise, quoting the Kiowa County News.

  Elise felt her sister’s tickling giggle, as if they were still tented atop Sandy. She looked outside. The wind had blown open the door to the storm cellar. Edith Gotswegon stuck out her too-long tongue. Eli Roberts had it in for her and out for her. Oh he did, did he?

  “Beg pardon?” said Mr. McQueen.

  The class was silent. They knew her to sometimes answer questions with quotes from the newspaper. She did it to them and to the teachers and to her piano instructor. Her classmates stared at their teacher. They were blind to commas adrift among the ice crystals, and their stony hearts were immune to Charlie Carter’s loss of his Beulah girl.

  She looked outside again, but the snow was too thick to see the storm cellar. Sandy galloped along the edge of the surf. Waves lapped at his hooves. He smiled, tickled. She smiled, tickled. A pelican lit on Sandy, the very spot where Elise had sat clutching her sister the four frigid miles to school.

  “Among the interesting relics owned by Captain James Lowery, of Missouri, currently visiting his son in Lone Wolf, is a stout old-fashioned hickory walking cane,” said Elise. “The stick was cut and used for some time by Henry Clay, coming from the Clay home in Kentucky.”

  “Elise,” whispered Lorena.

  “That is a long way for a cane to travel. It must be very stout,” said Mr. McQueen, who did not call on her again that day.

  Mr. McQueen was better at unpinning a blanket than pinning it. The way home was colder as the blanket flapped loose in the wind. Sky appeared in the gaps. Elise did not want to see the sky.

  Once during recess, she had sneaked into the teacherage, really just a room built onto the back of the schoolhouse with another stove and a bed and a desk. The walls were lined with the Kiowa County News. Insulation from wind that came from three states away, as far as Charlie Carter slept on his train ride west. Elise approved of the papered walls of the teacherage. She knew that the news insulated you. She knew that it was no good to you unless you learned it and said it over and over and then talked back to it, making it not news. It
wasn’t something bad that happened anymore and it was not boring people going to visit other boring people if you cut it up and said it aloud and then talked back to it.

  “The band boys left in three automobiles headed by S. P. Barnes to boost the Lone Wolf picnic. The autos were decorated and attracted attention,” Elise said into Lorena’s back.

  When Lorena said nothing, Elise turned her attention to fair Sandy. And, just then, kissed by the surf, the horse’s coat turned the color of sand kicked up by his hooves as the pelican rode him into the sun.

  “At dusk, is it true that the sun disappears into the ocean and drowns?” Elise asked. They collapsed into each other, tired out, really just a single bag of bones and giggles.

  “How should I know?”

  “The earth may not really be all that curved.”

  “Heavens to Betsy, not this again,” said Lorena.

  “Will you play with me when we get home?”

  “In the barn and freeze?”

  Lorena spent hours in her parents’ bedroom brushing her hair with her mother’s pearl-handled brush, counting the strokes as she pursed her lips in front of her mother’s pearl-handled mirror. Heavens to Betsy, not this again, for she did it every day. She never tired of pursing and counting and handling pearl. Lorena was seventeen; Elise, fifteen. Mostly the two years separating them did not matter enough to count, but lately the gap would sometimes rip the pins from the blanket and let in all the elements.

  In the warm months, Elise ran barefoot in the fields with the Bulgarian boys from the neighboring farm.

  “They speak gibberish, you speak gibberish, why don’t you marry them?” said Lorena. “You could get yourself in the paper once and for all.”

  The four Bulgarian children and their parents had lived in a one-room sod house, but now they had a real house with two rooms aboveground. They stored potatoes and onions and sometimes bales of hay in the sod house. Elise liked to huddle there out of the wind with the newspaper. She would read to the three boys—Andon, Andrey, and Damyan. There was also a girl named Blaguna, but she had married and moved to Gotebo. She was a year older than Lorena, and for some reason, Lorena admired her, though Elise found her haughty. Her breath smelled of paprika.

  “Is paprika a first cousin once removed to pepper?” Elise asked her sister once.

  “Of pepper, not to it.” Lorena was particular about her prepositions.

  Maybe Elise preferred the company of the Bulgarian boys because her own brothers, Elton and Albert, had died from prairie fever.

  Lorena blamed their father for their brothers’ deaths. She said he stored water in tanks and allowed the cows to drink from it and then dipped Mother’s pitchers in the tank and set them out on the dinner table.

  Elise said that their father did not know that prairie fever had gotten into the tank, and Lorena chose not to tell her that prairie fever was a euphemism for typhoid. Elise was led, by omission, to believe that her brothers had died from an allergic reaction to the prairie itself. She did not understand what in their constitutions made them susceptible to such an allergy when she and Lorena, who drank the same water, as did her mother and father, survived. Maybe certain people are supposed to keep out of the wind was all she could figure. But the wind blew also in Axtell, Kansas, which is where they had been before they came to Lone Wolf. Maybe Axtell was not considered prairie? Her memories of it were dim as she was five when they moved. She remembered only the house they lived in, which Lorena called nothing but a shack. The walls were also lined with newspapers, and a ditch ran behind the house where men did their business in daylight.

  Her mother had gone for two years to Knox College in Illinois. There she learned to play the organ. Every night before her boys died, she had combed their hair. Mother of Pearl, Elise called her, though she had no daughter named Pearl. That was just Elise’s name for her, or one of them.

  Where her parents met, or how, was not a story told to Elise. She knew that her father came to Axtell to work on the railroad, and that he was born in Pennsylvania, and that he had many ideas. He called himself an “idea man.” Other idea men would stop by to talk to him. Elise’s mother would watch them from the kitchen window, the one above the sink, as if keeping an eye on small children.

  One of the men, Wilbur Shilling’s father, Bud, was big. Elise and Lorena called him Big Idea.

  Apparently one of their father’s ideas had led them to Oklahoma. First to nearby Hobart, the county seat, along with thirteen thousand other people. Their father had read in the Marysville, Kansas, newspaper about a land lottery in Hobart. They lived for a month in a tent. Elise did not mind the smell of moldy canvas, which reminded her of bread, Madame Curie, and bugles. At dusk she and Lorena took their baby brothers in strollers to the edge of the camp called Ragtown to see the Kiowa. They came every night to stare. People described them as “proud,” but they appeared to Elise very curious. Elise had never seen Indians. If they had them in Axtell, Kansas, they kept them locked up somewhere or made them take back alleys.

  On the day of the lottery, their father’s number was called. He threw his hat in the air, which made Elton, who was four years old then, whoop and clap. Eleven thousand people were turned away that day. He had won, “free and clear,” he said, 160 acres in Lone Wolf.

  “This is the happiest I have ever seen Father,” said Lorena.

  “Yes,” said their mother. They waited for more, but she tended to the baby, Albert, who would die because of their father’s happiness. Their father was happy over winning the right to work acres of matted sod that proved so resistant to the dull plow he bought off a German that he had to straightaway use all the money they had saved for a windmill to hire a team of men with a special steel plow to break it up. A windmill to draw clean water from the ground would have saved her boys. This was what their mother meant by yes.

  “Where is Joe McNutt? I heard someone inquiring about him,” Elise quoted from the Kiowa County News. They were almost home. They could tell they were almost home by Sandy’s breathing. He breathed differently when he was close to being put up and allowed his fill of hay.

  “It’s an interesting question,” said Lorena.

  “Do you happen to know Joe McNutt?”

  “I have probably made his acquaintance,” said Lorena. She reached up to mess with her hair, getting it ready to pearl-handle. Probably she was pursing her lips. Elise wanted to pinch her. It wasn’t too cold to play in the barn. Sandy lived in the barn. Her father had only twenty head of cattle left because of an outbreak of something, who knew what, but the cows lived in the snowy fields. Sometimes they had icicles hanging from their noses.

  “Blaguna probably has an icicle hanging from her nose,” said Elise.

  “Blaguna is well married,” said Lorena.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that she married well.”

  “What are the degrees of marriage I would like to know?”

  “Well would top anyone’s list, obviously.”

  “Did Mother marry well?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Why do you like to do the same thing every day?”

  “Are you referring to washing beneath my armpits?”

  “Mother of Pearl,” said Elise. Lorena did not know that this was one of Elise’s names for their mother. She thought Elise was referring to the handles of the comb and mirror and she wasted no time informing Elise that mother-of-pearl was not pearl but a cheap imitation of.

  “I think that is insulting to mothers everywhere.”

  “I didn’t name it.”

  “I named Sandy.”

  “Not everyone calls him that, you know,” said Lorena.

  “But when I call him, he responds.”

  “He is responding to your voice. He does not speak English.”

  “He speaks island.”

  “What is island?”

  “Just never mind,” said Elise. Explaining gave her a mild headache and made her
sleepy at once. The Kiowa were a proud people and a curious tribe at once. Pride and curiosity somehow did not seem to go together in Elise’s mind. Maybe because her mother did not like gossip and if you asked a question about someone—for instance, if you were to march right in the house, because they had reached the house, because Elise heard the screen door slam shut by the wind, which meant her mother was struggling across the yard to unpin them—and asked her where was Joe McNutt, she would say it was none of their business, even if told that someone was inquiring about it in the newspaper, therefore making it more of a public notice than idle gossip.

  Her mother’s pride did not permit curiosity. It only permitted her to say yes when she meant, What has your father gone and done now?

  In the barn, combing the snow from Sandy, wiping him down with the blankets her father had bought from the Kiowa, Elise wondered if she would do well to marry one of the Bulgarian brothers. She tried to think which one. Andon was closest to her in age and he did not have a thing wrong with his nose, or his entire face, for that matter, but Damyan, whom the boys at school called Damn when the teacher was not around, paid closest attention when they met in the old sod house and she read aloud to them from the newspaper. He liked hearing who visited whom, the part Lorena and Damyan’s brothers and sometimes even Elise liked the least. The others were bored by it, but the section made Elise sad, for no one ever came to visit her family from Hobart of a Sunday, much less some famous relative who carried in his possession at all times a stout old-fashioned walking stick previously owned by a statesman. Only Big Idea and the other idea men came by their place, but their visits did not make it into the paper.

  The Bulgarians worked in the fields in fair weather, which meant that winter was the only time Elise got to play with them. If it was particularly cold, like it was out today, her mother would tell her not to go, but Elise was able to change her mind.

  “I will take Sandy,” she said, for it was a little over a mile across the fields to the Bulgarian’s farm, and if the snow blew up, it was easy to get lost. But Sandy knew the way.