Charlotte felt peevish without knowing quite why. “What’s so important about this teacher?” she asked her father and when he didn’t answer, she said, “It’s always just been one big crab apple after another in that pitiful little schoolhouse, anyway.” Which wasn’t exactly true. There had been Mrs. Groe for a while. But after her, it was crab apples, and nothing but.
Abruptly her father pulled out his wallet and slid from it a scrap of paper that he passed to her along with an envelope. “That’s Terence Tidball’s box number and that’s an envelope. If you’re through plaguing me, maybe you could address it.”
Though it was on a scrap of paper, her father had written the address in his beautiful cursive, the one he used when he took care with things. While she worked on the envelope, she couldn’t help but notice that he was quickly scribbling additions to his advertisement before folding the paper in two.
“Want me to proofread?” she said, extending an open hand, but he took the envelope from her without a word, slipped the folded advertisement inside, sealed it, and with—this much she saw—just the barest moment of hesitation, dropped it into the slot for outgoing mail.
“Did you change it?” she asked, but whatever other man she’d glimpsed when she’d walked into the post office had now slipped away. What was left was her everyday father, who swept up Neva with one arm and said, “C’mon now, all of you, or we’ll have the bride stewing in her juices.”
The bride was what he called their mother, and Charlotte thought that if her own husband ever tried, eighteen years into the marriage, to refer to her as the bride, she would have to kill him.
In the car, moving down the highway, the air was streaming again but as soon as her father turned onto the country road, the dust fell on Charlotte’s skin and mouth and tongue. Her underclothes stuck and clung and the heat seemed first to have rubberized the cups of her brassiere and then molded them to her breasts. When she slipped her hand inside her blouse to adjust the whole nightmarish apparatus, Clare stared at her openly until she said, “What are you looking at?”
Clare turned his head away from his sister and stared out his own window. He was wondering when he would ever see a girl completely naked and then he was wondering whether seeing his own sister naked would put him off wanting to see other girls naked, because if that was what would happen he would need to avoid it at all costs. He began diverting himself by remembering the names of every person on the wanted lists he had been looking at. Hillary Henderson, alias Bill Henderson, alias “2 Gun” Henderson, bank robbery. J. J. Comiskey, also known as “Peanuts” and “Dirty Neck,” for stealing 478 cases of Cream of Kentucky whiskey consigned to but never reaching Chicago. Nicholas “Nick” Delmore, murder of prohibition agent. Gloria Lisa Carter, missing from home, fourteen years old but looks eighteen. Jack David Salter. Sally “Goodie” Fahrenstock. On and on, one after another, that was how good his memory was when he wanted it to be.
Neva sat between them, which she liked. She was happy again, now that they were moving. Part of the fun of going to town was in coming back home. She worked her loose teeth and wondered where she left her tin of box elder bugs. The stair closet, she decided. Or maybe the tack room. One or the other. But she would have to find them or they would perish like the last ones. That’s what Charlotte had said when she’d shown them to her and asked what was wrong with them. They have perished, Charlotte told her. The car was moving and the engine was humming and she decided to fall asleep. She laid her head against Charlotte because Charlotte was softer, but Charlotte pushed her off and said, “Too hot, Nevie,” so she laid her head against Clare’s shoulder and of course Clare didn’t mind.
Charlotte, sitting directly behind her father, was sullenly regarding his thick, wavy black hair. One night, after he had read aloud from A Midsummer Night’s Dream for everybody in the front room, Charlotte and her friend Opal had walked outside to look at the sky and Opal had said that she thought Charlotte’s father must have descended from nobility or at least somebody aristocratic. The effect of this remark on Charlotte was odd. Initially she felt a pleasant swelling of pride but that was immediately supplanted by the need to debunk the notion entirely. Soon after, therefore, she began to refer to her father as His Highness. In a way it fit him, the way he could just take himself out of the real world. She knew no one who stood taller or worked harder than he did, but he wasn’t like the other hardworking farmers who continued the worrying when they were done with the working. He could look into a book or stare out a window and leave them all behind, and who knew what he was thinking then? His thoughts were some of the very few in the world that Charlotte actually wondered about. He made such odd decisions. What was he thinking, for example, when he thought Ellie Hoffman was the woman he should marry? What was he thinking when he brought her back here to Dorland? What was he thinking when he borrowed money to buy all that land on the wrong side of the hogback? And what was he thinking in advertising in New York City for someone to come here to teach unwashed farm kids in a pitiful one-room schoolhouse? How did he imagine that anyone in her right mind would leave New York City for Dorland, Kansas? Why, in other words, couldn’t he just come down out of the clouds and stick to the here and now, and do those things a grown man was supposed to do?
Almost lazily she announced, “His Highness is putting an ad in the Herald Tribune. He thinks an office girl in New York City will want to come teach in our horrid country school.”
The stricken look on her mother’s face as she turned toward her father was a reward in itself. Her mother didn’t speak a word, but none was needed.
“And why not?” her father said, and—another reward—his tone was beyond doubt defensive. He then said something in a mumble that Charlotte couldn’t make out.
“Pardon?” she said.
He jerked his head sideways and his voice was low and defiant. “I said a man can’t catch a fish without bait in the water!”
She thought, In that metaphor the teacher is a fish, the advertisement is the bait, and the water is murky, but she said nothing. They rode on in silence, except for the tink-tinking of small rocks on the undercarriage. Neva slept. Charlotte set her finger into Neva’s open hand and felt the hand close softly and wished now that she hadn’t pushed the girl away.
After a long while, Clare turned from his window-staring and said, “What’s a common-law wife, anyhow?”
Charlotte stifled a laugh. Her mother drew a quick breath but it was her father who explained. If there was one thing that you could count on from him, it was his ready explanation of other people’s dire situations. It was his own dire circumstance that he wouldn’t put under the magnifying glass.
When her father finished his explanation of common-law marriage, Clare considered it a few seconds and said, “So they just live together like a married couple until they sort of become one?”