While Ansel drove the straight oiled road toward Wichita, Ellie sat in the backseat with Neva’s head in her lap. She’d stroked the girl’s forehead until she’d finally fallen to sleep and now Ellie sat without moving in order to let her sleep on. From up front, Ansel didn’t speak; he had barely spoken since leaving the place. He hadn’t accompanied her a week ago Monday when she’d taken the girl to see Dr. Gilling in Dorland and he hadn’t believed the diagnosis when they returned. “Dust pneumonia,” Ellie had told him, and waited for the words to sink in, just as Dr. Gilling had with her. Dr. Gilling seemed to feel bad about the pronouncement, but Ellie, strangely, felt a kind of relief, first to have a name for the sickness that Neva could not shed and, second, to know that it was a sickness that came with a cure. It was only after these two reactions that the astonishing implication of it all had risen within her: Leaving Kansas was no longer just an option. It was a necessity. “Leave Kansas,” Dr. Gilling had said. “Kansas is going to kill her.” She’d recited those very words to Ansel, and didn’t know whether he hadn’t trusted the doctor’s judgment or simply did not want to believe it. He had insisted on seeing a specialist he’d heard about in Wichita and when Ellie, feeling defiance accruing within her, asked him how he thought they would pay for this specialist in Wichita, he had waited a long while before saying, “Maybe we can borrow it.” Which of course meant calling her father, and she had tightened her lips and said, “Okay then.” So she’d called him, and he’d listened in silence before finally saying, “So! Your daughter is sick and your husband will not get her to safety.”
“He will,” Ellie said. “He just wants to be sure the diagnosis is right.”
“And your husband has no money to pay your child’s doctor bills?”
Ellie didn’t answer. She could hear breathing on the line—Lu Walls and Jeannie Simpson, listening in—and then at last her father said he would send the money through Western Union. “And also, Eleanor, I am going to mail you a check for one hundred dollars. Do not cash it except for the expenses of leaving that place.”
She had begun a sentence that started with, “I don’t need—” but he cut her off by saying, “Good-bye, Eleanor.”
After he hung up, she heard the muted clicks of Lu Walls and Jeannie Simpson disconnecting. She went looking for Ansel in the barn; that was where she most often found him these days. He was bent over the tractor, tightening something with a box wrench, but she sensed he was aware of her approach, a sense confirmed when he stopped tightening and stood stock-still as her footsteps in the oily dirt drew closer. Why did she say nothing? Why did she wait for him to turn? To see the disappointment in his eyes that it was her? Because that was what she saw—fleetingly, faintly, but she saw it. He was let down to see her instead of someone else.
“That was funny,” he said. “I was just thinking of Charlotte and then your footsteps sounded like hers.”
He was lying—she was sure he was lying—and that only deepened her disappointment in him.
“My father’s sending the money,” she’d said in a neutral voice and Ansel had nodded and turned away and fitted the wrench to the head of another bolt. She’d said nothing about the one hundred dollar check and the conditions required for cashing it. He would find out soon enough. She should have mentioned it because Lu Walls and Jeannie Simpson would already be telling everyone who would listen, but she hadn’t told Ansel.
Now, this morning, in the backseat of the Ford, Neva coughed, opened her eyes to find Ellie’s face, and closed them again. Ellie snugged the blanket over the girl’s ears, then stared out at the passing landscape, the flat line of the horizon separating endless beige from endless gray. What if the specialist said she had something else? This was the fear she had been fighting since the appointment had been made. What if the specialist didn’t think that curing Neva would require them to leave Kansas and the Scottish girl and all of the rest of it behind? What would she have to do then?
41
That afternoon, the sky was as white as frost, and Clare was clenching and unclenching his toes on the front porch, wishing he had a hot sugared roll to eat, the kind his mother had once baked three times a week. He could taste the butter, the sugar, the cinnamon, the tang of yeast.
The door opened behind him and Charlotte walked out in her coat, singing her new favorite tune, which the radio seemed to play ten times a day. “Not much money, oh, but honey, ain’t we got fun?” She slapped him on the shoulder and announced, “We’re going to California!” She couldn’t keep from smiling and rising up on her toes a little.
“What?” Clare asked. He looked at the frozen wheat field, the brown rise of the hogback ridge against a pale blue sky, the empty pigsty, and the outhouse. At such moments, their smallness in the world seemed pitiful. Charlotte threw a handful of dried corn to the last three chickens.
“Mom’s inside writing to Aunt Ida,” Charlotte said. “If you ask me we should have gone years ago.”
Clare had always wanted to go to California, too, but that was before Aldine appeared.
“Why now?” he asked.
Charlotte shrugged. “Two reasons, I’m guessing. First is what the doctors said about Neva. That she can’t survive Kansas, which is ironic, in my opinion, because who can survive Kansas? That’s what I’d like to know. Doctors ought to fill out all their prescription forms with the words Abandon Kansas and put an exclamation point on it.”
Charlotte watched the chickens searching for more corn but they had eaten it all.
She said, “Know what the doctor in Wichita told Mom? He said that he treated a man last week who couldn’t breathe right, and after the doctor pounded on his chest, the man coughed something up. Know what it was?”
“I don’t think I want to,” Clare said.
“Dirt. He had a big plug of it inside him. Like a cork, he said.” She shook her head.
Clare picked up a stone and chucked it toward a fence post. It missed. “Is that reason number one and number two?”
“No. The second reason is the storm. Dad trapped with Aldine like that.”
“So?” Clare wished he’d been the hero who’d staggered out through the wind and driven blind in the brownout and found himself unable to restart the car until the storm stopped; then for five whole hours Aldine would’ve been his and his alone.
Charlotte pulled her coat tighter and fingered the place where she had very neatly darned a moth hole. “People talk,” she said. “And the coal she burned up was the school’s, not hers to use as she pleased. That’s why they’ve closed the school. That and the lack of funds. I heard about it from Emmeline.”