Tisha Read online

He came in and nodded to Fred. Fred said hello, then he said he’d better be going.

  “Not before we show off your handiwork,” I said.

  I brought the oil lamp and the three of us went inside. I showed him the blackboard Fred had made, the shelves. He’d even made a couple of shelves low down for the two little kids I’d have. Mr. Vaughn just glanced around. He didn’t seem too interested. “It’ll do,” he said.

  I was a little disappointed. The least he could have done was tell Fred he’d done a good job, but all he said to him was, “Well, you’ll be able to get back to your own work now.”

  Then I realized he’d come over just to see what we were doing. It embarrassed me and it made Fred feel uncomfortable too. He walked out right after Mr. Vaughn did. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I called after him.

  Before I went to sleep I went into the schoolroom again. I stood behind my table and imagined the kids sitting in front of me. It felt exciting. The room looked wonderful. I’d scrubbed the Yukon stove so it looked almost new and it was all ready with kindling and logs. On one of the shelves there was a whole row of books—a few readers, a dictionary I’d brought with me, and the old encyclopedia someone had contributed. I’d kept a few of the rocks Fred had pointed out to me when we took a walk, and they were sitting on another shelf. It was just a big bare room now, I thought, but in a few weeks, after the children began to draw and make things, it would look more like a schoolroom. Looking at the empty tables and chairs, I thought of so many things I wanted to say to the class that I went back inside my quarters and started jotting them down. They were things like our being as much a part of America up here as the people in any of the forty-eight states, and how important it was for all of us to be fine, well-educated citizens. When I went to bed I was so keyed up it was hard to fall asleep.

  VI

  School was supposed to start at nine, but by a quarter to they were all outside, so I went out and brought the folded flag with me.

  With the oldest boy helping me, I ran it up to the top of the pole and then we all said the Pledge of Allegiance. Right then and there I knew I couldn’t say one of the things I’d planned on. They all sounded too highfalutin’ and phony. In fact, once we were in the schoolroom I couldn’t say anything at all. I had stage fright. For a full minute the whole class stared at me silently and, completely tongue-tied, I stared back at them. The only sound was everybody’s breathing and the squeak of the floorboards.

  “How do you like the schoolroom?” I finally managed to croak.

  “Real spiffy,” Jimmy Carew said. He and his little brother and the Vaughn girls had seen it already, and so had Isabelle. Robert Merriweather and Joan Simpson hadn’t. They all looked around, murmuring their approval. I was proud of it. Fred had done a wonderful job. All the tables were covered with oilcloth and he’d painted the place with some pale green paint we’d found in Mr. Strong’s store. The color was a little on the bilious side, but it brightened the room up and made it look larger.

  “It smells good,” Joan Simpson said. She was six years old, blue eyes, blond hair. I’d have to teach both her and Willard Carew to read.

  After we found seats for everyone I wrote my name across one of the shades and said I was glad to be here. Then I shivered. “Before we go on,” I said, “does anybody know how to build a fire in that stove?”

  The schoolroom was so chilly that everybody sat with coats and parkas on. I’d tried to work the Yukon stove, a squat black metal affair a little bigger than an orange crate, but couldn’t get a fire going in it. Out of the many hands that volunteered I picked Robert Merriweather. Twelve, he was the oldest of my three boys and big for his age.

  He showed me right away what was wrong. I hadn’t used enough kindling. “Also,” he said, “you didn’t open the damper enough. You need a good draft when the fire first starts.” After he filled the stove with more kindling, he placed a couple of slender logs inside, then a couple of hefty three-foot logs on top of them. “You see,” he said, “this kind of stove is made for long logs, so you don’t have to keep feeding it so much.”

  “What do you know about that?” I said. “I thought all stoves were alike.”

  “Oh, no,” a few children protested.

  “Some you have to put small pieces in, like a cook-stove, some large like this one,” Elvira Vaughn said.

  “That one’s real ornery,” Jimmy Carew said.

  They loved the idea that here I was a teacher and I didn’t know something. I’d intended to spend the morning getting acquainted and had rehearsed how I was going to start off asking them about themselves, but I didn’t have to. Since they’d already taught me something, they didn’t think twice about asking me questions.

  “How come you don’t know anything about stoves?” six-year-old Willard Carew asked. “Everybody knows about stoves.”

  “Well, they don’t use wood stoves very much where I come from.”

  “Then how do they cook?”

  “Can anybody tell Willard?”

  Robert Merriweather raised his hand. “I can. They use gas stoves. We had one before we came here to Alaska.”

  “What’s a gas stove?” Willard asked.

  Robert looked at me to see if I’d let him go ahead. He seemed to be the kind of a boy who’d always been kept in check, and he was self-conscious. I nodded to him.

  “You turn on a switch and put a match to the burner and it lights right up. It’s a million times better’n a wood stove.”

  From there we went on to talk about furnaces and steam heat and fireplaces.

  “My father says a fireplace is the biggest waste of wood there is,” Eleanor Vaughn said. She turned to her twin sister Evelyn, who was as husky as she was. “Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ah, your father knows everything,” Jimmy Carew said sarcastically.

  After we decided which chairs and tables would be most comfortable for everybody and who would sit with whom, I asked them what they thought they were coming to school for.

  “’cause we have to,” Jimmy answered. That brought a laugh.

  “All right, that’s one reason. How many want to?”

  Everyone’s hand went up.

  “Wonderful. Why?”

  The hands went up again. I called on Jimmy’s brother Willard. “There’s nothin’ else to do,” he said with typical six-year-old honesty.

  “Another reason. Next.”

  “To learn readin’, writin’ and ’rithmetic,” Eleanor Vaughn said. She and her twin looked exactly like their father, the same big teeth and stern frown.

  “Fine,” I said. “What else?”

  Silence.

  “Nothing else? Anybody here know how to play the harmonica?”

  “I do,” Robert answered.

  “Anybody want to learn?”

  “Me,” Jimmy said.

  “All right, you’ll learn.”

  “Here in school?”

  “Certainly. That’s what school’s for—to learn what you want to learn.”

  “I’d like to learn sewing,” Elvira Vaughn said.

  “Me too,” I said. “I’m terrible. Any good sewers here?”

  Isabelle Purdy raised her hand.

  “Think you can show Elvira how?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “That takes care of sewing. Anything else anybody wants to learn, they can learn it—as long as they keep up with their work. Maybe we can even learn a little bit about each other, like where we’re all from.”

  The Purdys had come from Canada, we found out, the Carews from Pennsylvania. It gave me a chance to use one of the few teaching aids I had—a big map of the U.S. and Canada. It was my pride and joy and I wasn’t about to pass the chance up.

  “Where are you from, Teacher?” Elvira Vaughn asked me. Like her two sisters, her first name began with an E, but there the resemblance ended. She was slender and demure, not as sure about everything as they were, and more curious.

  �
��I was brought up in Colorado.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Who can show us on the map?”

  Isabelle Purdy raised her hand, went to it and pointed to Colorado.

  “Where would you say that is?” I asked her.

  “Ma’am?”

  “What part of the United States—North? South? West?”

  While a couple of hands waved frantically, she stared at the map, then shrugged and gave me a smile.

  “I know, Teacher, I know,” Jimmy Carew shouted.

  “Did you live in a big city?” Elvira Vaughn asked.

  “No. My family always lived in coal-mining towns.”

  “Do they do that the same way as gold mining?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “When you mine coal you have to tunnel deep down into the ground.”

  “They do that here too sometimes,” Robert Merriweather said. “It’s what they call drifting.”

  “Was the school you went to anything like this one?” Isabelle Purdy asked. She had the same kind of cheerfulness as Fred and her mother—always ready to break into an easy smile. And she was as immaculate as her mother, too. Her white middy blouse made her a standout. Most of the others had come to school in the same bib overalls and shirts they wore every day—even the girls. One of the Vaughn twins had a grimy shadow that came halfway up her neck. We’d have to start working on good health habits, I thought.

  “Something like it,” I said, “but we had different grades in each classroom.”

  “Can you drop your teeth out?” Jimmy’s little brother Willard asked.

  “No, I can’t,” I said. “Can you?”

  “My father can,” Willard said proudly. “He can hand ’em right out to you on his tongue.” He illustrated for me.

  “My father’s got a goiter as big as a baseball,” Eleanor Vaughn bragged, turning to her twin sister again.

  “That’s right,” Evelyn said on cue. They were like two comics in a vaudeville show.

  Before we broke for lunch I gave my six older children a diagnostic arithmetic test and while they were taking it I kept Willard and Joan busy making cut-outs and pasting.

  After lunch we appointed monitors for taking care of the stove, cleaning the board erasers, sweeping the schoolroom and the outhouse and raising and lowering the flag.

  Right in the middle of it we had an unexpected guest. Uncle Arthur walked in. Wearing a long gray coat that almost dragged the floor in front, he told us to just go ahead with what we were doing and pay him no mind. He stood by the door looking on, hands clasped in back of him while we went about our business.

  “D’ya have an extra chair, missis?” he finally asked me.

  The class seemed to take his being there for granted and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him to leave, so I sent one of the kids into my quarters for one. He sat down, folded his arms under his beard and just looked on for a while.

  He didn’t say anything until after I’d tried a couple of the kids at oral reading, then he said, “When you gonna have penmanship drill, missis?”

  “Maybe in a couple of days or so,” I said.

  “I could give ya plenty songs you could use for makin’ circles ’n’ straights if you like.” He took a pad from his coat pocket. “Show ya right now if you want.”

  “Can he, Teacher?” Jimmy asked. “They’re fun.”

  I’d never been much for penmanship, maybe because my own penmanship was so bad. If he had a way to make it fun I was all for it.

  I told him to go ahead and he opened the pad. He wrote a capital ? for us, chanting as he did it “Ya make a loop and go down, climb a hill to the top, then go down to the bottom and there you stop.” He recited a few more rhymes for other letters and the children were fascinated. “That teaches the kiddies how to write a good hand, ya see.”

  “We don’t have time to do it right now,” I said, “but I’d appreciate it if you’d teach me the rhymes.”

  He promised to write them all down for me, and then he left. I complimented the class on how well they’d behaved while he’d been there.

  “Him and those other old-timers always drop by,” Jimmy said. “They like to. You know—they’re kinda lonely.”

  A little later I found out I was going to have to be careful how I explained things. Jimmy asked me why everybody had to come to school at the same time and eat lunch at the same time. “How come you can’t do things when you feel like it?”

  “If everybody did it would be like a three-ring circus,” I said.

  “What’s a three-ring circus?” Elvira asked.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s like a chautauqua, only it’s bigger. It has elephants and clowns and—”

  “What’s a shuh-tawk-wa?” Jimmy asked hesitantly.

  I explained that a chautauqua was a fair, only to have Elvira ask what a fair was. By the time I was finished nobody really had any idea of what a three-ring circus was like. They had never seen clowns, or jungle animals, or acrobats. They knew nothing about all the things that the children in Forest Grove knew about—radio programs and air shows, movies and automobiles. If I was going to cite examples I’d have to pick things they were familiar with—gold mining and trapping, dog teams and hunting. Talking about the future of air transportation or radio left them uninterested—until I told them that one day soon airplanes would probably be bringing the mail right here to Chicken, or that maybe in another year or two they’d be able to listen to all the radio shows that people Outside could tune in on.

  One thing I could see was that I didn’t have to worry about keeping their attention. Everything was new to them and they were hungry to learn.

  Their big problem was reading. The only pupil who could read well was Isabelle Purdy. The rest of the class had trouble reading orally from a third-grade reader. The Vaughn twins were thirteen, but their sister Elvira, three years younger, could read better than they could. A few of the children could do fifth-grade and sixth-grade arithmetic—Robert Merriweather was good enough to do seventh-grade work—but their reading comprehension was terrible.

  It had been almost a year and a half since there’d been a teacher here, and except for Isabelle and Robert, none of them knew anything about history or geography or social studies. I’d have to figure out some kind of a starting point—some way of getting them interested enough in history and geography so that they wouldn’t be bored by them. Before I could do that, though, I’d have to get them to feel like a class, not like just a bunch of kids that happened to be in the same room. They weren’t used to talking with each other much—at least not about anything that didn’t have to do with mining or trapping or local gossip. They needed something that would bring them together and let them show off what they could do.

  When 3:30 came nobody wanted to go home, which was fine with me. I invited them all into my quarters for cookies and hot cocoa. I still wasn’t used to the cookstove. Trying to put just enough wood in to keep the oven at the right temperature was driving me crazy, but the cookies I’d made weren’t too bad.

  “Oh, looka that,” Elvira said, admiring my coat. It was wool suede with a mouflon fur collar and cuffs. She ran her fingers along the sleeve. “Feels nice,” she said.

  Her sister Evelyn pinched the fabric expertly and shook her head. “You won’t be able to wear that around here too long.”

  “Why not?” I asked. It had cost me $35 and it was my prize possession.

  “Come winter it won’t be warm enough.”

  “That’s right,” Eleanor agreed.

  “So what?” Elvira said. “It’s still nice to look at.”

  The cocoa was just about ready and I’d started to pour it when Jimmy Carew called to me. “Is this yours, Teacher?”

  I nearly had heart failure. He’d found the nickel-plated revolver and was showing it to Robert and little Willard.

  Taking it from him, I put it on the highest shelf in the cache, shoving it back out of sight.

  School was over for the day. />
  Fred popped in a little while after they left and asked me how I thought I did. I told him I’d been scared at first, but now I felt pretty optimistic.

  “The only thing I’m not sure of, though, is how to make one class out of them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Give them the feeling that they’re all learning together, find a project they could all work on. Back in the States it was easy. I could take them to a museum, or to the local dairy or cannery, then we would talk about it and write compositions about it. Besides that, everybody was in the same grade, so they had a lot in common to begin with. Here they’re all in different grades. What I need is some kind of a project they can all work on, something local. I’m going to take them on field trips, but I need something else.”

  “You could take them to see some of the old sourdoughs.”

  “You think they’d like that?”

  “The kids? They’d love it. So would the old men.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. The only thing I’d have to do is make sure I don’t wind up getting lost. I still don’t know my way around here.”

  He laughed. “Make a map.”

  “Did you say a map?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I could have kissed him. “You just found my project for me.”

  I was just about to explain the idea to him when there was a knock at the door. It was Eleanor Vaughn. At least I thought it was. She and Evelyn looked so alike I couldn’t tell them apart yet. “I’m sorry to bother you, Teacher,” she said, “but I lost a mitten. I thought maybe I left it in the schoolroom.”

  We took a look around, but it wasn’t there.

  I didn’t think anything about it until later, when I remembered how her father had dropped in the night before. Fred had been with me then too. It could have been a coincidence, but I had the uncomfortable feeling it wasn’t. I tried to remember how the twins had been dressed when they came to school. They lived only right next door, and after I thought about it I realized that all they’d had on were sweaters. Neither of them had worn mittens.

  VII

  If there’s one thing that fires up a class for the day’s work, I’d found, it’s some good rousing singing the first thing in the morning. And this class was no exception. Right after we went through Yankee Doodle and a few other songs, I started my two beginners out with some busywork, then gave reading-comprehension tests to a few of the older kids. While they were busy I worked with Isabelle and Elvira on long division.