When she was done, the room fell quiet and one of the Wright boys said, “God almighty.”
Emmeline Josephson turned and said, “Hector, that’s God’s name in vain.” Which caused Hector to shrink back.
“This time you will all sing,” Aldine said, a tremor in her voice that she hoped they could not detect, and swept her arm toward all of them and then pointed to the page in the music primer. This time, when she began, they sang along dully. Three more songs followed, each sung as weakly as the one before, and Aldine was about to suggest another, simply because she didn’t know what else to do, when Neva said, “Maybe we should start our lessons now.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Aldine said and began to stare at Mr. Geoph’s cryptic note. Recitation Program: Ari. Study Group 1: Ari. Study Group 2: Ari.
Did Ari do the recitation of the flag pledge? Is that what it meant? She had no idea.
“Who was Ari?” she said, which baffled the class as much as everything else she said. “Ari,” she said again, very slowly. “Who was Ari?”
“Can I look?” Neva said, nodding at the paper that Aldine held.
But when Neva looked at the scribbling, she could make no sense of it, either. “I was in study group 1,” she said, “but I don’t know who Ari is.”
“How do you spell it?” Emmeline asked, and when Neva told her, she said, “That’s just Mr. Geoph’s shorthand for arithmetic.” Something cunning came into her face. “But that’s not our study plans. Where are our study plans?”
Aldine felt a bulb of sweat roll along her rib cage. This was all a mistake. The most horrible and foolish mistake. “Then let’s begin your arithmetic recitation,” she said, and when she finally made herself understood, Emmeline said coolly, “How can we recite when we haven’t studied anything yet?”
“Sums!” Aldine said in a sudden voice. “Sums!”
Phay Wright said, “Sooms?” and then his brothers became a chorus, saying “Zooms! Zooms!” which caused building laughter until Aldine to her own surprise slapped the top of her desk with her hand so hard that she felt a shock of pain.
This brought stricken silence, in the midst of which Emmeline Josephson cocked her head slightly. “Would you like me to lead them?” she said in a sweet voice that Aldine knew not to trust and yet couldn’t at this moment afford to resist, and so they began. “Three plus one equals,” Emmeline prompted in a rhythmic tone and the class responded “four” in unison, and so it went, on and on, through the sums of twelves, which only Emmeline and Neva were able to answer assuredly.
During the first recess, Aldine waited until everyone was outside, then seated herself at the teacher’s desk. To keep from crying, she squeezed shut her eyes and imagined herself on a sun-warmed rock overlooking the River Doon, eating brown bread and cheese with Leenie and hoping their father, standing in the tea-colored water in his rubberized overalls, would catch fish enough for dinner. And then her mum stirring up a white sauce for the fish and floury potatoes, shaking pepper over the sauce in the skillet, a fat cut of butter melting in the middle of it.
She opened her eyes, took several long, deep breaths of air, and pulled out her knitting bag. She’d managed only a row or two when a sudden thought stopped her.
An idea, from her primary teacher in Ayr.
Aldine went to the storage cupboard, looked in, and felt as she did when she had a recipe and found all the ingredients in Aunt Sedge’s pantry. For now, before her, she saw a sheaf of colored paper, a box of old rulers, and a spool of stout string.
17
The Prices were making a supper of boiled eggs, canned potatoes, and pickled beets. The scantness of the offering had caused Clare’s mother to send him to the garden to look for a last tomato or two, but there were none at all, and so now he had to choose his way back. He’d come the long way, following the creek, but the shortcut back was by the pasture, where the hogs were buried, and the smell of them was still there. On the other hand he was longing to cast eyes on Aldine, whom he hadn’t glimpsed all day, not even at breakfast, so that was that. He would take the shortcut. The game he played was this. Would her actual corporeal self be as fetching as the girl who lived in his mind all day long? Always the answer was yes. Yes, and then some.
When he got close to the hogs, he took a deep breath and broke into a run, but he could never quite outrun the smell. Eighteen dead of cholera. He and his father had piled them up with layers of straw and tried to burn them out of the world, but the fire went out and left a sickening heap of blackened, wasted flesh, so they had to bury them by hand, digging all day, shovel by shovel, with vultures watching just like in a Tom Mix movie, the dirt finally covering ears, snouts and trotters, swollen bellies, and black death. Everything but the smell. Anything could bring it to him, right down to singeing the hair on his arm when feeding the woodstove. A few days after they buried them, the wind had blown enough of the dry, sandy soil that hog parts began protruding. One such protuberance was a snout looking like it was coming up for air, but a day or two later it was gone. Coyotes, probably, or maybe a fox or vulture. Or maybe even Artemis. He’d seen Artemis eating a rat.
His father was sanding the front door when he returned. “No tomatoes,” Clare told him and his father said, “No, I supposed not.” He folded the sandpaper so that he could reach a corner of the door’s inset panel.
“Going to paint it purple this time?” Clare said, a little joke. His father always painted it the same shade of red that his own father had. As he slipped past his father and into the mud porch, Clare said, “Purple or maybe chartreuse,” which drew a small laugh from his father.
Even if there were none of the good smells of baking coming from the kitchen, Clare was glad for the voices. All of them, but especially hers.
“Clare! Clare!” Neva shouted when she saw him. “You should come back to school again, it was ever so much fun!”
He smiled at Neva and then, finally, using the delay to tantalize himself, he let his gaze rise to Aldine, whose eyes seemed bright with good feeling.
More fetching than imagined. Unquestionably more fetching.
The table had already been set. The food was carried in. “His Highness is served,” Charlotte called out to their father, who came in and surveyed the sparse offerings without a grumble, went so far in fact to profess a love of pickled beets.
Neva said the blessing and the serving plates began to pass.
“So, Nevie, tell us what made the day so grand,” his father said. Which meant he’d been listening from the front door.