“The game that Miss McKenna made up for us,” Neva said, “with planes and prizes like we’ve never had before!”
His father turned his bemused look to Aldine, who explained the competition in spite of interruptions from Neva. Each student had been given a long length of string, and tied bits of yarn to it every twelve inches, measured out precisely, until they had fifteen knots. The boys had hammered nails high up on opposite walls and pulled the strings in taut straight lines overhead. Then after each child had made a paper airplane, it was suspended from the first knot.
“And every time Miss McKenna gives us a star on a paper we get to use the transom pole and move our plane up to the next knot and the first one to get to the last knot wins a prize!”
His father was smiling and nodding. “Yes exactly,” he said quietly. “That’s how it’s done.” He sounded nearly as impressed as Neva.
“And we all gave our airplanes names!” Neva said. “I called mine Mr. Benny.”
This provoked laughter and then Clare, feeling a little outside it all, said, “It’s a swell idea. It truly is.”
Aldine looked up from her plate and let her dark eyes fall on him. “It wasna’ my own,” she said. “I had a teacher in Ayr who did something like it. Mrs. Lynch she was. She gave away a goldfish in a bowl.”
His mother drew a knife through a pickled beet. “And what prize will you give, Aldine?”
A kiss. That was what popped into Clare’s head.
“It’s a surprise!” Neva proclaimed. “Isn’t it, Miss McKenna?”
Aldine gave a laugh that seemed almost musical. “Aye, I’m afraid it’s a surprise surely.”
Charlotte said, “What did Emmeline Josephson name her airplane?”
“The Flight of the Fancy!” Neva said.
Aldine looked up. “There was a bit more, though, wasn’t there, Neva? I believe Emmeline christened it The Flight of the Fancy Pants, but”—the prettiest smile formed on her lips—“she wrote pants very faintly indeed.”
Everyone laughed as if this were funny, but Clare knew Emmeline Josephson, and he knew she hadn’t meant it as funny.
“The only bad thing was that the lesson book wasn’t there, but Miss McKenna had us work from our books and come up one by one to discuss what we’d done.”
His father grew suddenly alert. “The lesson list wasn’t there?”
Aldine shook her head. “Wasna’ on the desktop like you thought it would be. Truly, I looked everywhere until I was frantic. It was not to be found.”
Clare milked after supper and when he brought in the separator for washing, his father was standing over the wall telephone saying things like, “Good. No, not at all. Did they say where?”
Clare leaned into the kitchen, caught Charlotte’s attention, and mouthed a silent “Who?”
“Mr. Josephson,” she whispered.
After his father said good-bye to Mr. Josephson, he waited a moment and added, “Good night, Lu, good night, Jeannie.” Which was what he always said to the two farm wives who habitually listened in. Then he set the earpiece into its cradle.
“A mystery,” he said when he came into the kitchen where Charlotte and Aldine were already cleaning the separator. “Emmeline said that she and her sister left the lesson folder in a desk drawer after they cleaned.”
Aldine’s jaw set and she asked what desk that might have been.
“Yours.”
“Truly now. And in what drawer might that have been?”
“One of the lower ones. Where they thought it would be safe.”
“Safe from what?” Clare said. He couldn’t help himself. “Safe from the teacher finding it?”
His father maintained his lordly calm as always. “Let’s not get excited,” he said, and turned from him to Aldine. “You looked everywhere—all the desk drawers?”
“I did,” she said, but then her voice slackened. “I’ll admit, though, I was a bit agitated with the minutes ticking down.”
Clare said, “But if Emmeline knew you hadn’t found it, why—”
But his father cut him off. “Enough, Clare. Miss McKenna can take a look tomorrow and we’ll see what’s what.”
Charlotte, who wasn’t normally quiet during such exchanges, was notably quiet during this one.
Later, when he stepped out on the porch and heard Artemis barking at some distance, he followed the sound and found Charlotte sitting on a fence rail east of the barn, smoking a cigarette.
“Where’d you get that?” he said.
She handed it to him so he’d keep quiet about it. “That would be none of your beeswax,” she said.
He liked the way the smoke felt in his lungs. It made him feel older and more hopeful. He exhaled, gave the cigarette back to Charlotte, and said, “Pretty out here when it’s cool and the air’s still.”
Artemis leaned into his leg and he let his hand fall to her head. Her skin was loose. When he’d come upon her in the barn eating the rat, she’d given him a low growl to keep him away, and then taken what was left of it into her mouth and carried it into a dark corner. There were doves in the rafters. He’d tried to listen to them but all he’d heard were the wet, crackly sounds of Artemis eating the rat.
He said, “Remember when we had barn owls?”
Charlotte nodded but didn’t speak.
“It was better when we had barn owls,” he said.
From where he was standing he could see the window of Aldine’s room. The light was on but she’d pulled the curtains—she was a demon for pulling the curtains. Still, it was nice to think of her in there, writing a letter or reading a book, and maybe if it was really hot up there wearing not much or—a luxurious thought—nothing at all. Later, after she put the light out, she would open the curtains again—she did this every night—and he liked to think of her up there, lying in bed, gazing up at the stars before falling asleep.
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing,” he said. He’d started at the question and wondered if she could tell it.
After the cigarette burned down, Charlotte buried it and lit another, her face different, pretty even, in the sudden illumination. She drew from the cigarette and handed it to Clare. The chickens had settled and so had the cows so there was nothing to be heard now but the crickets. He said, “What do you think happened to the lesson list?”
He wasn’t sure, but he thought Charlotte had just expelled smoke through her nose, a new and impressive trick. She said nothing, though.
He said, “I’ll bet Emmeline and Berenice hid it when they were there to clean.”
Again Charlotte said nothing, which meant, he was pretty sure, that she knew it to be true.
“That Emmeline Josephson is a piece of work,” he said in his bitterest tone, and Charlotte gave out a sudden, harsh laugh.
“That’s a rich one coming from the little acolyte who couldn’t take his moony eyes off Emmeline in school or church either one.”
“Well, sure, but that was before.”
It was a mistake talking to his sister. She had a cat inside of her and the cat never slept. It was always ready to pounce.
“Before what?” she said, exhaling smoke, then grinning and extending the cigarette to him.