Clare slowly ran his tongue across his gritty teeth. “I’ll bet you did,” he said.
After a while Charlotte said, “You’re supposed to kill Goosey for dinner.”
“Goosey is a layer.”
“We can’t take a layer to California, can we?”
Clare didn’t mind shooting squirrels or rabbits, but he hated butchering chickens. “All she’s good for is boiling,” he said, but not very loud. He wondered what would happen to Aldine if they all moved to California. They could take her along, maybe. More likely she’d go back to her sister in New York, maybe all the way back home to Air, Scotland, where there was a river called Dune. He wished he could go such places. When he pulled the ax out of the chopping block, Goosey went on pecking at the ground, her naked pink back a record of troubles with roosters now dead.
“Bryan O’Linn had no hat to his head,” Clare sang to her, and she shied a bit.
“He thought that the pot would do him instead,
Then he murdered a cod for the sake of its fin,
‘Whoo, as good as a feather,’ says Bryan O’Linn.”
He fingered the dust in his pocket. He sank the ax in the block, scaring Goosey enough to make her half fly clumsily toward the front porch. The wind was starting to pick up, and he crouched down on the dirt to keep warm, thinking that he would go through the presidents and vice presidents once before he caught her.
42
I wrote to Ida this afternoon,” Mrs. Price told Aldine at supper, her face rosier than Aldine had ever seen it. “That’s my sister,” Mrs. Price added, though Aldine already knew who Ida was: the one in the photograph on the marble side table who looked like a well-fed, cheerful, darker-haired Ellie Price. Aldine knew, too, that the family was leaving, probably to California. Charlotte had told her, barely able to suppress the gladness in her voice. She and her mother had won. Ansel had lost.
“She lives in Fallbrook, California,” Mrs. Price was saying. “Lemons grow there and I don’t know what all.” Mrs. Price pointed to the wooden box she kept papers in, a crate decorated on one side with a peeling dark blue picture of oversized lemons and white flowers. Lofty Lemons, it said. Fallbrook, California. The box had always been there, but Aldine had never known that it came from someone they knew.
“Do you think they have Silver Shred there?” she asked. As she looked at the bright yellow lemons, impossibly round and large, she longed for a spoonful.
“Silver what?”
“I guess you’d call it lemon jam. It’s marmalade.”
Ellie shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it. Ida sent those lemons a long time ago, but she never sent jam. She does accounts at the packinghouse.”
“I wrote to my sister, too, in New York City. I suppose Mr. Price told you.”
She saw from Mrs. Price’s face that Ansel hadn’t told her, a fact that for some reason pleased her. She’d told Ansel that she asked her sister for a loan of enough money to buy a train ticket back to New York. She’d also made it clear that she still expected to be paid by the school board and she was sorry when Ansel had said, “That’s only right,” and “Fair is fair,” but gave her nothing by way of timetable for when such payment might be forthcoming.
“Leenie would’ve had her bairn by now and I’m dying to see it,” she said, looking only at Mrs. Price while she spoke, not at Charlotte, though what she really felt was Ansel’s presence across the table, his dark hair and his arms, the sleeves of his work shirt rolled up to the elbow.
A silence began to set in.
“Did you know there’s a storm on Jupiter that’s been blowing for two hundred and sixty-eight years?” Charlotte asked no one in particular.
No one answered, so Aldine out of courtesy said, no, she couldn’t imagine it. She still expected, when she looked out the window, to see dust billowing up like a brown, vaporous sea that would bury them as the volcano buried Pompeii.
“At least our storm didn’t last that long,” Charlotte said. Her tone was benign but not sincerely so. She just wanted to bring the topic round to what happened at the schoolhouse, wanted everyone to have to think of it again, but Ansel deflected her.
“No, Lottie, it didn’t last that long,” he said, and then remarked that he’d been asking around to see if he could rent out the farm. The Tanner, Osborne, and Heapson places had all been sold at auction for a tenth of their worth, he said, so he wouldn’t get anything for his property, or for his equipment, either.
“Rent to who?” Ellie asked. “You can’t rent something that blows out from under you.” Her forehead seemed unusually high and stark because she’d tied a navy-blue scarf tightly over her hair. Just looking at the scarf made Aldine’s scalp itch because she did the same thing when she didn’t have time to wash her hair.
“I heard a tenant might be moving onto the Tanner place,” Clare said.
Ansel took a forkful of boiled chicken and pushed it across the gravy on his plate. His serving, like Aldine’s and everyone else’s, had been a meager pile in the center of the plate. Aldine thought he must be ravenous, being twice her size. She was hungry every night now.
“Opa’s sent a draft,” Ellie said. “I have only to go to the bank with it.”
Ansel didn’t look up but his fist stiffened on the fork. Clare had once told Aldine that, for a wedding gift, Herr Hoffman had given Ellie a silver serving spoon engraved with her first name instead of her newly acquired initial. Aldine pressed her lips together and took a drink of silty water.
“Did you hear about the Stuyvesants?” Charlotte asked. She had finished her stew and was pressing the fork down in the gravy, then licking it. It was what they all did.
Mrs. Price gave Charlotte a warning look. “Now is not the time, Lottie.”
“What?” Neva asked, her big eyes glossy with fever, her mouth ajar so that you could see a pair of oversize teeth pushing their crooked way from her gums. “What happened to the Stuyvesants?”
“Nothing,” Mrs. Price said. “Can you eat another dumpling, Neva? Please? Look, I cut it into little pieces for you.”
“Tell me first,” Neva said, regarding the dumpling.
Mrs. Price shook her head. “Absolutely not,” she said.
Neva looked pleadingly at Aldine, who shrugged and smiled and said, “Listen to your mother now.”
Charlotte had already told Aldine in morbid detail how five members of the Stuyvesant family, who lived on a farm not ten miles away, had died of ptomaine poisoning from eating apricots canned without sugar. For the first day they were just fine, she said, and they went about their business, but then they developed double vision. The four-year-old, the eleven-year-old, an uncle, a sister-in-law, and the mother had died, in that order.
On the table, as usual, was a jar of home-canned fruit. Aldine had been hoping they were peaches, and that they would be dessert. Now that Mrs. Price had opened them, she saw that they were small like apricots.