“I forgot,” Charlotte said. What made her words cheeky was the indifference with which she delivered them. “She said she was going to work on a geography project at the school, but that’s not what she’s really doing. What she’s really doing is reading one of my books and smoking her cigarettes with ivory tips.”
They were all looking at him over their handkerchiefs like the monkeys labeled Speak no evil. He bolted up and said he was going to the school. He didn’t wait to see what Ellie would say about it. Aldine was an outsider. This was no better than a blizzard. She could stumble out of that school and be lost in a minute. He clapped the wet rag back over his mouth and pulled the door tight behind him, to keep the dust out.
36
What Aldine noticed first was the loss of light. The page she was reading turned gray, as if night had fallen. Her tarry glowed like a pinched candlewick. At home, such darkness meant one thing, and she thought, It’s going to chuck it doon. A good rain would be a relief to everyone and most especially to Ansel, though she had told herself to call him only Mr. Price in her head now.
Did she love him? When she was alone, she let herself remember his face that day in the barn or his fingers playing the dulcimer. It was like turning on a faucet. You let it all pour out and wash over you. Then she turned it off and went on being what she was, a teacher in his house who would never do any of the bad things Ellie and Charlotte suspected her of doing.
Not until she stood up and looked out the wavy glass did she become afraid. She could barely see the American flag on its pole, flung out by gritty winds, and she wondered if Mr. Marvin, who lived on the nearest farm and raised and lowered the flag every day of the year, would come to take it home. She could hear what sounded like rocks pit the wall of the school, a rattling, angry assault of airborne pieces. She opened the front door without stepping out, and into her nose and mouth came the smell of pulverized loam and a taste like burned chalk. The road leading back to the Prices’ had disappeared. She set the door closed, and looked around. She drew close to the stove, where she had built, as she usually did on these cold Saturday afternoons when she stole away, a comforting fire, one that now gave merely adequate heat. She opened the door to the stove, threw her cigarette butt into its orangey mouth, and crouched there with the door ajar, watching the coals for a long moment. A sudden burst of wind blew right into the roof and shot down the stovepipe, throwing freezing air and lit cinders out onto the floor. It was as if the stove had spit at her, and she flung the door closed before she stomped out the live red crumbs.
She went again to the window. In the yard, the flag was like a reddish waving shadow and then as she stared at the strange thing that it had become, it vanished. She kept staring at the spot but she could not see it at all.
Going out in it would be an idiot’s business. That much was sure.
The blue curtains they’d used for the Winter Entertainment were still folded up on a back shelf, and she prepared herself like an animal in a burrow, laying them out in layers until she had a makeshift bed. She watched for spiders but not especially. She covered herself with the last panel, even her head, and hoped, as she hoped nightly, that when she woke up it would all be over. What the it was, she didn’t know. The winter. The pennilessness. The aloneness. The badness. The curtains smelled of mothballs and clarty sheep, still clotted here and there as they were with the wool that had served for winter clouds, which no one believed looked a bit like clouds except Neva. Neva did. Aldine laid her head on the novel she’d been reading and fell into grainy sleep.
37
The truck started when Ansel tried it the third time, his hands gritty, the seat gritty, the whole machine rocking slightly in the brown wind. Things whose position he thought he knew—the coop, the western fence—were hidden like furniture in a room when the lights go out. He drove slowly, blindly, and came within sickening inches of the porch and then the cottonwood. Creeping along the road, he knew that he would only be aware that he had veered from its relative safety if he struck something or sank into the sand that lay in drifts along the edges. His nose was raw and—a disquieting surprise—he tasted blood in his throat. Still, he had found the road, and the road was straight. There wasn’t likely to be another car headed for him even on a clear day, so he drove slowly ahead for what seemed the right distance to the school, and then kept going and going and going, praying and squinting and searching and yet certain that he’d somehow passed it, until, at last, he spotted what he thought must be the edge of the school fence. He did not feel any pride in finding it. He felt only gratitude. He rolled slowly forward until he banged into something that turned out to be the flagpole.
He forced the car door open against the wind and choked his way across the schoolyard, glad they had decided to sink the flagpole so close to the building, and glad when his outstretched hand touched something solid. He tried not to breathe as he felt his way along the boards of the outer wall, remembering the direction of the door but not the distance, tripping on the steps and scraping his knuckles. “Miss McKenna?” he shouted, and when he climbed up the steps and found the doorknob, he felt himself caught like a thistle in a barbed wire fence.
He had to close the door behind him and use the rag on his eyes, then his nose and mouth. It was like having the flu, this storm. The dust gave him a sense of bodily pain and a thickness of mouth that was physically nauseating. Then he could see the bundle on the floor, a dark, twisted shape, her pale, lovely face rising in the center of it. “What is it?” she asked. “Is a tornado coming?”
“No,” he said, though he couldn’t be sure. A ferocious gust hit the side of the school and he said, “Come on. I’ll drive you back to the house.”
“No,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
Instead of answering, she lay back down. “I can’t.”
That was a surprise.
“Do you want to sit here a minute and see if it dies down?”
“Yes,” she said, her smooth, pale face sideways on the blankets. He couldn’t figure out what the light-colored clumps were. It looked like maybe she had torn the stuffing out of thick blankets. Then he remembered the play.
He didn’t really think the storm would die down. A normal wind could blow for ten or twenty hours. Once, a wind had blown for one hundred hours. If it blew for even three, the sun would go down and it would be even harder to get home.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll wait a minute.”
They listened to the wind against the walls. It made him think of being in the barn with her that afternoon and he felt both dread and happiness.
After a while, she said, “Do you believe in fate, Mr. Price?”
“I suppose so,” he said. “In a certain way.”
“How?”
“I don’t believe in using it as an excuse. But things shape us. We’re led to certain things and have certain gifts.”