Tisha Page 11

  In the middle of it Willard got bored with what he was doing and started scaring little Joan by telling her a bear was going to get her next time she went to the outhouse, so I had to separate them temporarily.

  About mid-morning Merton Atwood showed up. He was even quieter than Uncle Arthur, glancing down shyly every time I happened to look his way. He watched Elvira do a long-division example at the board, then Isabelle, but when my oldest boy, Robert, did an example I saw him raise his hand.

  “Mr. Atwood?”

  “Mert.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Mert.”

  “How come that didn’t come out even?” he asked me, pointing to the board.

  “That’s long division with a remainder,” I said. “You come out with a fraction.”

  He stayed until lunchtime. The example was still on the board and he went up and stared at it. “That easy to learn?” he asked me.

  “Long division? Easy as pie.”

  “Alwuz been in’risted in learnin’ that. Alwuz wanned to, but never did.”

  “Come by after school some time and I’ll show you.”

  “I might do that,” he said. “I just might.”

  “You could do me a favor too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Could you draw me a simple map of Chicken here on the board with a dot to show where everybody in the class lives?”

  He did it for me. He drew in Chicken Creek and then drew lines for the two other creeks that Joan Simpson and Robert Merriweather lived on. After lunch I told the class about the project I had in mind. “It’s something we can all work on together,” I said. “We’re going to make a map of Chicken, something like this one, but bigger. We’re going to use one whole wall for it. Everybody can draw a little picture of their own cabin and we’ll put it up in the right place.”

  They liked that idea, of having the place they lived in and their name right up where everybody could see them. “But that’s only part of the project,” I said. “What we’ll do is find out all about Chicken—its history and geography, what grows here, what’s produced here, everything. After that we’ll find out about other places.”

  “But there’s nothing to know about this place,” Jimmy said. “There’s nothing here.”

  “Oh, I can think of a dozen things I’d like to know about it. Just one, for instance—does anybody know how Chicken got its name?”

  Nobody did, so I asked Robert Merriweather if he’d ask around and write a report on it. He said he would. Then we decided that the next day we’d go on our first field trip to collect leaves and rocks and any other interesting things we could find.

  After school, as the children went out the door, there was a roly-poly Indian woman waiting on the porch. She was bundled up in a light blue flannel coat that was made out of a blanket, and she had a little girl with her. “How you do, Tisha,” she said. “My name Rebekah Harrin’ton. I come see you.”

  “I’m glad to meet you,” I said. “Come on in.”

  “This my kid,” she said when we were in my quarters. “Lily. Lily, you say how you do.”

  Lily peered up at me from under a peaked hat of wolf fur. I could barely see her eyes under it. “How you do,” she said. She was charming.

  Mrs. Harrington put a paper sack down on the table. She took out a few pounds of dried salmon. “F’you. Present.”

  “Thank you. I was just about to have some tea. Would you like some?”

  “I like. Yes.” I took her coat. She sat down and made herself comfortable, hitching her skirt up a little. She had on a couple of other skirts underneath it. “You got nice place,” she said.

  “Thanks to Fred Purdy.”

  “Ah, Fred he good boy, you make bet on that. Whole Purdy family got good people. Everybody like.”

  It took her a few minutes to get around to why she’d come, and it was just what I was hoping for. She wanted to enroll Lily in school. “You not got too much lotsa kids now?”

  “Not at all. I don’t have enough. How old is Lily?”

  “Fo.’ He be fi’ soon—Janawary.”

  When she said “he” I looked at Lily again to make sure she was a little girl. She was. “She’s a little young,” I said, “but I think it’ll be all right.”

  “Oh, he be one smart kid my Lily,” she assured me. “Learn like hell. Already he write A, B, F, P—many alphabets. My husbin Jake he teach.” All of a sudden she became sad. “Only one bad thing, Tisha. Lily he scare come school all alone heself. Need Momma.”

  “You can sit with her till she gets used to it.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Of course.” With all the old-timers who’d been coming in I couldn’t see any harm being done.

  Her grin was as big as sunshine. “You one helluva good joe, Tisha. I come with Lily tomorrow.”

  The next morning they were almost the first ones to arrive. After the Pledge of Allegiance I told the class that Lily was going to be their new classmate. “She’s a little shy,” I said, “so I’d like you to be especially nice to her.”

  “How about her?” Jimmy Carew said, pointing to Rebekah. “She comin’ too?”

  “Until Lily gets used to school and can come on her own.”

  There were some snickers.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked. But nobody said anything.

  I didn’t think anything more about it, and once we got down to work the class didn’t either, but the next day Evelyn Vaughn told me that her father said the school board wanted to have a meeting right after school.

  The three of them came into my quarters looking solemn—Maggie Carew, Angela Barrett and Mr. Vaughn. I was surprised to see Angela on the board since she didn’t have any children. I asked them if they’d like some coffee or tea, but they said no. The four of us sat around the table and Mr. Vaughn rapped his knuckles on it. “The meeting will come to order,” he said.

  They asked me a couple of questions about what I’d been doing, and I told them about the project. They didn’t seem too impressed. Mr. Vaughn got right to it. “How come you’re letting that Indian woman come to school?” he said.

  “Mrs. Harrington? She’s just sitting with Lily.”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “Yes. She said that Lily was a little scared to come by herself, so I said it would be all right if she sat with her until Lily was used to it.”

  “Well, we don’t like it,” Angela said.

  “She’s not bothering the class at all,” I said. “She’s quiet as a mouse.”

  “We want ’er kicked out,” Angela said sharply.

  “And the kid along with her,” Mr. Vaughn added.

  I was stunned. “Lily? But why?”

  “She’s under age. A kid has to be over five and under sixteen to go to this school. You know that.”

  “I know, but does it matter that much?”

  “It matters to us,” Mr. Vaughn said. “You have enough to do to teach our own kids properly without wasting time on some little siwash that doesn’t belong here.”

  “I don’t think it’s doing any harm to let her come,” I said to Maggie Carew. She hadn’t said anything up to now and I had the feeling she’d be more receptive than the other two. “She’s a bright little girl, and besides that we don’t even have a full enrollment. We’re supposed to have ten and all we have is eight.”

  “The law is that this school is for kids from five to sixteen,” Mr. Vaughn said before Maggie could answer, “and the law’s the law. Let’s take a vote on it. I vote that Lily Harrington, being too young to attend this school, be expelled. How do you two vote?”

  “I vote the same way,” Angela said.

  “Maggie?”

  “You got a majority already,” Maggie said. “You don’t need mine.”

  “We’d like to make it unanimous.”

  “I’m all for throwin’ Rebekah out,” she said, “but I don’t care about the kid one way or the other.”

  “You abstain?”

  “Y
eah.” She didn’t seem too happy about the whole thing.

  “You’ve got your orders,” Mr. Vaughn said to me. “See that you carry them out.”

  After they left I sat thinking about it. I couldn’t believe it—that people could act that way. Just because someone was an Indian. I was ashamed of them. And I was ashamed of myself too. If I’d had any guts I’d have told them off, let them know what I thought of them. But I didn’t. I’d let them buffalo me because I was new and I’d been scared of them. Now I had to tell Mrs. Harrington her little girl couldn’t come to school.

  I asked her to stay after school the next day, then I told her. The look on her face made me wish I was a thousand miles away. She knew as well as I did why the school board didn’t want Lily, but all she said was, “He sure like go school my Lily.”

  “I know. I’m going to write to the commissioner about it, Mrs. Harrington. I’m going to ask him if he can make an exception in Lily’s case. I’m sure he will. In the meantime, if you want to, you could bring Lily over here after school a couple of times a week and I could tutor her.”

  “What tooda, Tisha?”

  “Teach. I could teach her here in my quarters a couple of times every week.”

  “You do that?”

  “I’ll be glad to. Let’s make it every Monday and Thursday right after school. You can learn at the same time.”

  She smiled. “Tisha, you make me too much happy. You bet we come!” She went out beaming.

  That wasn’t the end of it, though, because the next morning, right after we finished singing, Rebekah and Lily showed up again. With them was a big man, Rebekah’s husband Jake, and all I needed was one look at him to know there was going to be a storm. He was as nice as could be to me, though. He took off his Stetson and said he was pleased to meet me. Then he asked me what swivel-eyed jackass said his little girl couldn’t come to school.

  I took him into my quarters and explained the whole thing to him.

  “The school board, eh … Well, little lady, I gather you don’t have any objections to my little girl gettin’ educated.”

  “None at all.”

  “You sit tight then, while I have a little talk with the school board.”

  He slammed out of my quarters and went right next door to Mr. Vaughn. We could hear everything that happened from the schoolroom. He pounded on Mr. Vaughn’s door and what followed after that was probably the finest and most eloquent cussing I’d heard since I was a little girl in Blazing Rag. It started off with him calling Mr. Vaughn a mangy, misbegotten, worm-eaten egg-sucker and went on improving with every sentence. Not one of us in that classroom said a word the whole time. All we could do was marvel at it. There were a couple of silences in between the cussing, but it went on gathering steam for about five minutes without one word being repeated. “Now, you potbellied, yelping, walleyed sonofabitch,” Mr. Harrington finished off, “is my little girl goin’ to school or ain’t she?”

  We couldn’t hear what Mr. Vaughn said, but not ten seconds later Mr. Harrington strode back in as red as the smoked salmon Rebekah had brought me. “Little lady,” he said, “Mr. Vaughn said that if it’s all right with you, the school board would be pleased to have Lily attend your class.” He even remembered to take off his hat.

  “I’d be delighted, Mr. Harrington.”

  “How about you?” He asked Rebekah. “You want to give me a hand takin’ out the sluice box or park here for a while?”

  “I come help you, Jake,” Rebekah said proudly.

  “Well then let’s go, woman. There’s work to do.”

  I’d have kicked my heels together and jumped up and down if I’d been alone. The whole thing couldn’t have worked out better if I’d planned it. Lily was in school, Mr. Vaughn got what was coming to him, and I was off the spot with the school board.

  For the next few days everything went fine. The class really took to the idea of the map of Chicken. It started us talking about all the different kinds of maps there were, treasure maps and world maps, weather maps, and produce maps. We decided that since we had a whole wall to use we ought to show not only where everybody lived, but some of the things we’d found on our field trip. We’d come back loaded with treasures—birch and cottonwood leaves, samples of willow and alder, and rocks galore. Elvira Vaughn had even found a piece of black silicon with a shell fossil in it. After some discussion we decided to put some of them up on the map. The rest we’d make up books about—leaf books and fur-sample books, animal-picture books and food books. The project began to take on shape. When it was finished, we decided, we’d invite everybody in Chicken to come and see what we’d done. The class was so enthusiastic about it that I had trouble bringing them back to their regular lessons.

  Robert Merriweather’s report turned out to be excellent and I tacked it on the wall.

  HOW CHICKEN GOT ITS NAME

  Chicken got it’s name from the first prospectera who came here. There was a lot of Ptarmigans here and they thanked God for it because they were hungry. They were so grateful they wanted to name this place Ptarmigan, but they couldn’t spell it They named it good old American Chicken instead. This is what Uncle Arthur said.

  Mert Atwood says this isn’t true. Chicken got it’s name because they found gold nuggets as big as chicken corn here.

  No one can ever know the real truth, I guess.

  Inside of a few days the schoolroom began to feel like one, with pictures and lesson papers all over the walls, our rock collection on one of the shelves, and a little herb garden sitting in tin cans on one of the window sills. Not that we didn’t have our troubles. With everybody doing different things in one room there were bound to be arguments. When my three beginners were restless they’d get in everybody’s hair. Willard would bother the older children or start scaring Joan and Lily by telling them about a wolf coming into their cabin some night to eat them up. They’d begin to cry, disturbing the others, so I’d have to find coloring work or something else for them all to do, or let Willard go home for a little while.

  Aside from that the only other problem was interruptions. Everybody in and around the settlement seemed to feel the school was the one place open to the public any time. Mr. Strong had told everybody I had the key to his store, so every so often someone would come in wanting to buy something. A few times it was people like Angela, who lived in the settlement, and I was able to tell them to come back after school, but a couple of other times it was people who lived some distance away, like Joe, and I had to leave the class. I finally posted a notice on the school door saying no goods could be purchased at the store during school hours.

  On Friday still a third old-timer wandered in. His name was Ben Norvall, a wrinkled old basset hound of a man with drooping moustaches. He was just about the most well-spoken individual I’d met here so far. He could quote Shakespeare by the yard and he offered to lend us his whole set of Shakespeare’s works if we promised to take care of it. He even told the class the story of Macbeth and they’d been spellbound by it. The only bad thing about him was that he looked and smelled something awful. I mentioned him to Maggie Carew and she told me not to let him in again.

  “If you do,” she said, “you’re ruinin’ it for the rest of us. No one’s lettin’ him in until he burns those clothes he’s got on and takes a bath. As long as he’s got a place to go he won’t do it.”

  By the time the first week was over I felt pretty good. As far as I could tell the class was really interested in what they were doing and they liked coming to school. The only trouble I could see I might have was teaching Robert arithmetic. He was pretty good, and I’d have to do some studying to keep ahead of him. Aside from that I was pretty optimistic.

  I shouldn’t have been though, because on Monday I was in trouble with the school board again. This time it was over Chuck. He showed up Monday morning about fifteen minutes before school. Robert had already started the fire in the schoolroom stove, and I was inside my quarters making my bed. Outside, Jimmy Carew was to
ssing a ball against the porch base and talking with the Vaughn girls. All of a sudden he stopped and there was silence, until Jimmy said, “Where’d you come from?”

  “From Louse Town,” Evelyn Vaughn said.

  “Who is he?” Jimmy asked her.

  “Mary Angus’ kid.”

  “You talk English?” Jimmy asked him.

  “Yiss,” Chuck said.

  “Whattaya want here?”

  “Come school.”

  “Like hell you are,” Evelyn said. “This is a white school.”

  “I come here.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Tisha, she say I come.”

  “‘Tisha’? Who the hell’s Tisha?”

  “He means Teacher.”

  “I know what he means.”

  I went outside. “Good morning, everybody,” I said. “Hello, Chuck—nice to see you here finally. How are you feeling?”

  He looked down at the ground and mumbled, “Good.”

  He looked anything but good, though. He was thinner than ever and his lips were all chapped. His clothes didn’t help any. His mackinaw was so small his wrists stuck out and his pants were so big the bottoms were ragged from scraping the ground.

  We had the Pledge of Allegiance inside because it was so cold out that ice bridges were forming all along the edges of the creek. After we sang I introduced Chuck, gave him a seat and started everybody working. When they were all busy I took him over in a corner and gave him a second-grade reader to read from for me. He didn’t do well with it, but he did fine when I tried him with a first-grade reader. His arithmetic wasn’t bad either.

  The class was restless that morning, too many of them preoccupied with giving each other looks about him. A couple of times he got hit by a spitball, but I couldn’t see who did it.

  During recess the older kids wanted to play dodge ball. After we showed Chuck how to play I took my three young ones on the side to play with them. After just a few minutes had gone by, the dodge ball game got out of hand. I didn’t see it until it was too late. By the time I stepped in Chuck’s nose was bleeding, and he was crying. They’d made him “it.” I took him into my quarters, and after the bleeding stopped and he was cleaned up, I called everybody back inside. “Who started the rough stuff?” I asked Robert.