Prairie Fever

by Michael Parker

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Set in the hardscrabble landscape of early 1900s Oklahoma, but timeless in its sensibility, Prairie Fever traces the dynamic between two sisters: the pragmatic Lorena and the chimerical Elise. Their connection to each other supersedes all else, until the arrival of a schoolteacher sunders the sisters' relationship as they both begin to fall for him. With poetic intensity and the deadpan humor of Paulette Jiles and Charles Portis, Parker reminds us of how our choices are often driven by our passions. Expansive and intimate, Prairie Fever tells the story of characters tested as much by life on the prairie as they are by their own churning hearts.

Release date: May 21, 2019

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

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.

Her mother wrapped her in her grandfather’s greatcoat, or perhaps it was her great-grandfather’s coat? It was huge and itchy and Sandy did not care for it. “Leave before the sun drops behind the trees,” her mother would say, but she must have been thinking about Kansas, because in Lone Wolf there were no trees to speak of. To the east, south, and north was the ocean of prairie and just to the west ran the worn but noble Wichita Mountains, rising from miles of flatness as if discarded, like the detritus cast off by wagon trains of old. The Kiowa thought the mountains sacred, but Elise found them depressing and would prefer nature to speed up its course and wear them down to pebbles, so her view would be unencumbered by lumps of rock and dark brown dirt.

“Sometimes when we arrive at Oklahoma we burn cow dung,” said Damyan one day in the abandoned sod house. His brothers shushed him. He was often caught staring out the window by Professor Smythe, who preceded Mr. McQueen. Elise would stare at him staring. His eyes, like hers, could see beyond the playing field, the stable, the outhouse. He was the only person she had ever heard say that barbed wire was a bad idea. She thought to ask her father about it, but if it wasn’t his idea, he wasn’t that interested.

But Damyan did not like Mr. McQueen.

“He is not much,” said Damyan that day in the sod house.

“Not much what?”

He shrugged and grabbed the paper, as if he could read it. She snatched it back.

“I do not have time to teach you English, by the way.”

“I speak English good.”

“Perfect,” said Elise. “But back to Mr. McQueen. He is not much what?”

“Something is in his belfry,” said Andon.

“Well, I should hope so,” said Elise. “I would think they made sure of that before they hired him.”

She learned from the Bulgarian brothers that none of the boys at school cared for Mr. McQueen. But none could say why. If only they had said why.

That night, as always, she whispered to her sister in the dark. They had always slept in the same room with their brothers, and she and Lorena had shared a bed. After her brothers died, they got separate cots. Her mother insisted upon it. Elise was aware that her brothers had died of prairie fever so that she could whisper across the narrow space between the cots to her sister in the night. Their room was in the attic and mostly slanting, shadowy eave. They were so close that her sister heard her whispering and said, What? But it was so cold up there, with only thin board and shingle separating them from icy, snow-belching clouds, that her words froze sometimes before they bridged the gap. Having turned to ice, her sentence shattered into letters, and each letter tinkled like chimes onto the floorboard.

“It has come to my attention that the boy half of the schoolhouse is not enamored of Mr. McQueen,” said Elise.

“Which of your Bulgarians told you so?”

“Damyan,” she said and then added, “also Andon.”

“What else did they tell you?”

“That when they first came to Lone Wolf they burned cow pies to stay warm.”

“I am not, as you know, enamored of your Bulgarians, but you may have noticed that we burn coal? That is because there are so few trees in this place.”

“Father might get the idea to plant some.”

“You will need to plant the idea in his head.”

It was a curious phrase, “plant an idea.” It suggested that ideas grew in the manner of, say, cotton. Her father’s ideas did not seem to reach maturity before he harvested them.

“You are making fun of me,” said Elise.

“I am making fun of Father,” said Lorena.

“Do you care much for Mr. McQueen?”

Lorena was silent for some seconds. Elise could hear the wind of her thoughts.

“I feel that, like all of us, he has his limitations.”

“Which are?”

“The point of life is to know your limitations,” said Lorena.

Elise thought about this. Her first thought was that Lorena’s recent tendency to state the point of life was irritating. Her second and subsequent thoughts concerned her own limitations. She was not attentive to the world around her if and when the world around her turned to dirty dishwater that her mother asked her to dump in the side yard. If the world sent her on an errand and the errand was as dull as dishwater, she came hard up against her limitations.

My own limitations, A list. By Elise Stewart.

1. My mind, I never feel it and it is like a fly not satisfied with any surface upon which it lights, and abuzz always.

2. Mother-of-pearl will never be to me what they say it is, which is a lie.

3. I would marry a Bulgarian, why not if I took a notion, and I would not care if the marriage qualified as “well” on Lorena’s grand scale.

But she realized that her limitations were many and it would be daylight if she kept up the list. She attempted to sleep, but she shivered. Lorena felt her shivering and came and got into the cot with her. They were pinned inside, the blanket blocking out the wind and snow. She relaxed into her sister’s back. Sandy’s hooves in the surf. Now she could whisper. Her words would not ice up and break into chiming letters crashing against each other and then to the floor.

“I don’t think I put much stock in pride,” said Elise.

“Well, that is certainly a limitation.”

“When people speak of it, it seems they mean very different things.”

“The same could be said for the word ‘Sandy,’” Lorena said.

“Sandy is a name, not a word.”

“My point has been proven. Rather perfectly, by you.”

Sometimes Lorena was a bully. Elise stayed awake as her sister slept like Charlie Carter, across three states. She stayed awake to mourn the loss of her own Beulah girl, only she did not know what her own Beulah girl was. Just that she had one.

On those frigid nights when they slept crammed into a single saggy cot, Lorena’s bossy sleep-breath attempted to corral her. It tried to plant ideas in her mind.

What if, Elise wondered in the night, she passed her sister on the street one day and her sister did not even see her?

“You’ve not said why it is that the boys dislike Mr. McQueen.”

“Why don’t you ask them?” said Lorena, which is what she always said when Elise asked a question she could only ask Lorena about someone else.

The next morning the pump was frozen. Where was Father to start the fire in the stove? Her mother had to do it. Her mother often moved around the house with one arm crooked as if she were carrying her baby boy. Almost every woman in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, and likely also Axtell, Kansas, had lost a child, but her mother seemed to take it the hardest. Elise wondered if she did not have a touch of prairie fever herself. Would this not explain why she always told Elise to leave for home when the sun began to slip behind the trees?

Prairie fever, I burn with it. It is the opposite for me of what it was for my poor dead brothers and my addled mother who carries around still her two baby boys in her arms. It is not death but life. I love the wind and the way it makes everything slap and creak and whistle. In the prairie dog villages, I know each hole and who lives there. I deliver their mail. I love the mounds where the Kiowa buried their dead. I can take you there, but you mustn’t climb them or the spirits of fierce warriors will follow you always from afar. You will always feel a shadow. Turn and look behind you all you want. You will not see them, they are too quick.

“Hold still, Elise,” said her mother as she pinned the blanket in the barn. “If you don’t hold still, I will stick a pin in your sister.”

“Please hold still,” said Lorena.

Sandy set off in a trot. Lorena claimed to be the rider and Elise the passenger, but Sandy knew the way. In blinding snow and sideways wind, Sandy could feel the way.

“Wade Vineyard and Carnie Bickerstaff were at Hobart,” said Elise.

“They deserve each other.”

“Should they marry, she would be Carnie Vineyard.”

“An ever-so-slight improvement.”

“Will you ever not be able to see me on the street?” she whispered to Lorena, but the heavy blanket muffled her words, and Lorena said, “Stop grunting, please.”

“For rent: two-room house, second door west of schoolhouse.”

“One room for me and one for you,” said Lorena.

“Mother can come,” said Elise. She decided her sister disliked all men. She put her to the test.

“When Charlie Carter woke and cried out for his Beulah girl, did you think that was funny or sad?”

“I wasn’t even there. And neither were you.”

All the proof she needed.

“Elise,” said Lorena.

Elise was all ears and only ears.

“Please try to answer the questions put forth to you by others,” said Lorena. “Not everyone cares about what is in the newspaper.”

“But you do.”

“The Sunday school at Bethel purchased an organ through Professor R. C. Adams.”

Elise smiled. Her smile warmed her sister’s back. It was a kiss on her neck. Sandy felt it and air escaped through his nostrils, a snort of delight.

“But, Elise?” said Lorena.

“Mr. McQueen never said the name of his horse,” said Elise. She waited for her sister to say, Why don’t you ask him? But Lorena did not. Straightaway, as soon as Mr. McQueen emerged in his fur-lined cap to unpin the blanket, his East Coast face flushed by the icy wind of the prairie, snow in his eyebrows, revealing what he might look like when old and gray, Elise said, “Why, Mr. McQueen, good morning!”

Her sister did not have to groan. Their bodies had be. . .