He knew the parents in the audience had smiled and clapped, not with gusto, but at least enough to be polite, and he knew that the children had enjoyed putting on most of the show, but that was not what any of them would remember. They would remember the rope, and poor Mrs. Tanner walking away with her damaged boy, and the way Aldine had nonetheless kept the show going, probably so she could sing at the very end and show her voice to such advantage.
34
It wasn’t so bad, the play, she didn’t think now, though it all seemed bad while she hung there in the air. The next day, at the very beginning of school, Aldine had told the children that they had all performed beautifully and that what had happened with poor Yauncy was no one’s fault, least of all theirs, and then Harlon Wright said, “I thought Yauncy was the best part of the show!” which got a big laugh from his brother and wasn’t nice, but it did help to put the sorry part of it aside and allow them all to think about the good parts if they wanted to.
It would be a short day, which made the other children happy but not Neva. She liked being at school with Miss McKenna and doing her lessons and being warm and singing songs. And today would be the day for the airplane prize because there were a week’s worth of tests and papers coming back today and her plane and Emmeline’s were almost nose and nose with only three more knots to the finish. On Miss McKenna’s desk the goldfish with its long ribbony tail hovered and stared and sometimes did a graceful turnabout.
Right after the pledge and the singing, Miss McKenna pulled the tests out of her bag and looked them over dramatically.
“If I got hundreds on every one of those, I’ll be right in the thick of it,” Phay Wright said, and Harlon said, “If you got hundreds on every one of those, my name is Agnes Turpentine,” which was a new one in Neva’s book and for some reason made her laugh. Maybe it was nervousness.
“I’ll pass out the hundreds first so you can move your planes,” Miss McKenna said, and everyone watched while the different students received their papers one by one and then used the transom pole to move their plane.
“Emmeline,” Miss McKenna said, “receives three perfect scores.”
This was met with a general groan, and Emmeline, smug as a queen, moved her plane ahead the three knots to the finish line. Which meant Neva needed four to tie. Almost before she’d made that computation, Miss McKenna said, “Neva receives three perfect scores.”
Neva looked down at her desk. Phay said, “That’s good, though, Neva. That’s real good.”
She rose and moved her Mr. Benny plane to a spot just behind Emmeline’s. She didn’t look at Emmeline. She knew what Emmeline’s face would look like if she did, all rosy and glorying and pretending to be nice.
She could hardly remember the rest of the day, except she’d made it a vow not to let anyone know how bad she felt because she didn’t want Emmeline Josephson to have that satisfaction, so she was taken by surprise when Clare over supper said, “So who won the goldfish?” and all of a sudden the dam broke and she was crying like a baby and running from the room with her face burning in shame.
That was the bad part.
The good part was the next day when Clare walked all the way to town and went to Oswald’s Five and Dime and traded this and that and came home with a goldfish in a bowl that was just for her. She named it Goldo and said it might go on stage with Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Gummo, and Zeppo.
35
At first Ansel thought the huge cloud rising might mean rain. It was from the southwest, the right direction for a good hard rain. Storms like this were violent in the beginning, with lightning and thunder and gusts of wind. These things fell upon you before the rain.
But there was no lightning or thunder. Just darkness billowing, a roiling cloud that went, he suddenly realized, from earth to sky, not sky to earth.
Artemis barked at it, but Artemis always barked at storms. The chickens quarreled their way to the coop. It was noon on a Saturday, the middle of February, and he assumed everyone was home. Clare, Ellie, Neva, and Charlotte came first to the porch or windows, then the yard, expecting the sucking mineral cavity of air that brought rock-hard showers. Not until the mountainous clouds reached them and he saw larks trying to outfly the wind did he realize the air was all dirt and no water, as if hell had come up from the ground. In the next moment they were blasted with dirt, almost swallowed by it, and they covered their eyes to run for the house.
For a few minutes they just stayed in the living room, wiping their eyes and faces, tasting dust on their teeth, breathing in the particles that swirled through the air. No one even sat down. They were used to blow months, used to spitting dust out like tobacco juice, but this was something different. The dust blotted out the sun. He kept staring out at it. He couldn’t close his eyes. If he closed his eyes, he would imagine the world ending. Things like that happened. Not ending, maybe, but close to it. An asteroid, then dust, then the world turned into another place. It happened to the dinosaurs; why couldn’t it happen to humans?
“Is it smoke?” Ellie asked. She was holding a potato and a peeler, which she didn’t set down. “Is there a grass fire, do you think?”
“No,” he said. “It wouldn’t have so much dirt in it.”
“Maybe we should be in the cellar,” Clare said, leaning down so he could peer out the window. “Maybe it’s a tornado.”
Ansel was still staring out. Tornadoes were dark, it was true. “But it came from the ground, not the sky,” he said. “It’s the ground blowing.”
“But why is there so much of it this time?”
Neva’s eyes were enormous, and when she coughed they all stiffened, afraid that it would be like the night she couldn’t stop for over an hour and had to gasp deep to get any air at all. He said they should breathe through wet handkerchiefs for a while, like when you were filtering out smoke. He got them all to sit down, and with the handkerchief pressed to her mouth, Neva’s coughing stopped.
“Shouldn’t someone go up and see if Aldine’s okay?” Clare asked.
“Yes,” Ansel said, glad he didn’t have to be the one to suggest it. “Charlotte, you go.”
“She isn’t here,” Charlotte said through her handkerchief in an even voice. She had one hand on Artemis, who normally wasn’t allowed in the house.
“What do you mean—where is she?” Ansel couldn’t keep the annoyance out of his voice, even though Ellie had asked him to go easier on her. “Why didn’t you say so before?”