“Might be they’re all at the matinee,” he said, and he introduced her to Mr. Tanner, who had not a car but a wagon with a team of black mules. She wondered in a hungry, hopeless way how far it was and climbed up beside him. She sat with folded hands already gritty from touching the wagon. Without even entering the shady town, they headed for the place in the distance that seemed exactly like the place they were, and she watched the furrows spoke by, one long row fanning slowly into another, until it began to seem that there was nothing else left in the world but hoof plods, furrows, creaking wheels, and the sweat glistening on the rumps of the animals made to pull them.
Mr. Tanner had not spoken, nor did he look at her. Occasionally he made a clucking sound and said something to the mules—“Edna, Edna,” it seemed to her—but otherwise he stared straight forward, almost as if the world had lost interest for him.
In front of them one of the mules shat casually. This, too, passed without laugh or joke or comment. It was too much. She had to speak.
“Where’s the wheat?” she asked, not that she knew a thing about wheat. A salesman on the train had talked to her of wheat prices and thousands of new-tilled acres until his voice was just a drone. But the fields around her seemed nothing but dirt.
“Not up yet,” Mr. Tanner said, and allowed himself a dull review of the landscape before staring forward again. “It’s seeding time.”
Her skin felt so dusty and the air was so dry that she wondered if dust covered the pupils that let her gaze out of her dusty head. Finally they passed a farmhouse. After a long time, another. She had seen many of the same kind from the train and could not get used to how frail and far apart they were. At home and in New York, the houses were made of stone. These were just wood.
She almost started when Mr. Tanner said, “I suppose it isn’t what you expected.”
When she turned, she saw that he had been following her gaze out to the countryside, and something in her went out to him then, this round man with his frayed cuffs and tattered boots, so she said, “I’ll wager it has its own beauty, doesn’t it, though—once you have the feel for it?”
A small rough laugh broke from behind his beard, but at what she wouldn’t know, for he said nothing. After a while, he clucked and again said, “Edna, Edna.”
“Who’s Edna?”
Mr. Tanner seemed startled. “What’s that now?”
She slowed down her voice. “Who is Edna?” she asked, and when this seemed only to boost his confusion, she said, “Is one of the beasts named Edna?”
The man’s expression relaxed. “Oh,” he said. “You thought I was saying Edna, but I wasn’t. I was saying, ‘Ed now.’ That’s the old fella on the left. The other one is Billy.” A second or two passed. “You cannot beat a good mule.” Another pause. “Their legs are all the same length, I think that’s the main thing. So they ride smooth. Plus, they’re smarter than horses.” He allowed himself a glance at Aldine. “Both Ed and Billy can open a horse gate. They just have to see you do it twice and that’s it.”
After a few more fields passed by, Mr. Tanner said abruptly, “Another example is that a horse will just kick at you anywhere but a mule will wait and plan and aim above the waist, that’s how smart they are.” He was nodding to himself now. “These two mules here, I wouldn’t trade them for six horses, or for love or money neither.” The vehemence of this proclamation surprised her, so she let a little time pass before venturing with, “And when you say, ‘Ed now,’ what do you mean by it?”
“Say again?” he said, and she did and this time he understood her.
“Oh. Ed will drift left. He’s blind in the right so he wants to drift left and Billy’s been with him so long she just lets him do it.”
That Billy was a girl was a small revelation Aldine decided not to pursue.
Minutes passed, a good many of them, it seemed to Aldine as she stared off, and then when she turned around, Mr. Tanner was regarding her.
“What did you say your name was?” he asked.
She said it and he repeated it so badly that she said it again and though he again gave it rough treatment, she nodded and said, “Yes, that’s it. Aldine McKenna.”
A long creaking minute passed. Then Mr. Tanner said, “And where’re you from?”
“Scotland.”
He made a sound like it stumped him, and then, to her surprise, he asked, “What’s that like?”
“Wet,” she said. “Burns wherever you look.” She closed her eyes briefly to pretend she was there, moving slowly among dark green sheltering trees. When she opened her eyes, she caught him looking at her again. It seemed an odd look, neither friendly nor admiring.
“Burns,” he said. “Wet burns.”
“Aye.”
More silence.
She said, “Will ye have children at the school then?”
He looked forward at the sweating mules and went on looking for so long that she wondered if he heard the question. Or perhaps it was her accent. Maybe, she thought, people in Kansas—including the children she taught—wouldn’t understand a word she said.
“No,” he said. “Not anymore. We have the one boy and he’s done with school.”
When he went no further, she said, “All grown then?”
“Yes,” he said. “All done growing.”
He fell silent then, and the wheels jounced and turned and she had nearly fallen into a doze when Mr. Tanner’s voice, as if from some distance, said, “That’ll be the Price place.”
And so she saw it for the first time: the far-off tree in bright yellow leaf, the tall white house, the huge gray barn that you could tell, as you got closer, had once been red. The land surrounding was flat and dry, chunky and hard brown on the furrow tops and only barely darker in the crevices.
“The school?” she asked.
“That way,” Mr. Tanner said, and pointed, but she couldn’t see anything.
10
Aldine expected to climb down from the wagon when Mr. Tanner drew the mules to a stop near the yard gate, but Mr. Tanner just sat, so she sat, too. A sloshing, motor-spinning sound came from the back of the house, and Aldine guessed she’d arrived while someone was washing clothes.
“You in there, Ellie?” Mr. Tanner called out. “You got a visitor!”
After a moment or two, a woman in a blue apron dress stepped onto the porch. Her hair was mouse-brown and oily, held up from her neck with pins. She hadn’t quite lost all of her looks. Her eyes were a pale blue, as if a stronger shade had been washed out of them, and they peered out with an expression that Aldine would later come to think of as suppressed disappointment. She shaded her eyes with her hand as Mr. Tanner said, “This is Alleen McCanna.”
“Aldine McKenna,” Aldine corrected, but her voice was a low rasp, and the woman on the porch looked at her as if she’d just made a gagging spasm and feared she might make one again. Even under the dowdy apron dress, the woman’s figure was statuesque, her breasts so prominent as to seem bovine. That Aldine was here, in this place, among these people, out of her own self-determination, made her failure as an adult human being seem inarguable. She pressed her lips inward to keep from crying. Is this what had made her aunt choose the lonely house on Bellevue Crescent over life in Japan? The known world over this terrible conspicuous not-belonging?