Tisha Page 15

  I didn’t want to do that if I could help it, especially after what he said. It made me understand why being able to read was so important to her, why even though she wasn’t learning she still hung on. “I gotta learn, Teacher,” she told me once. It was the only time she’d ever opened up. “I gotta pass that eighth-grade exam. If I do my mother promised I could go to high school in Fairbanks.” It was the only chance she had to get away from her family.

  But no matter how hard I worked with her it didn’t do any good. I started to get surly myself. Everybody else in the class was working hard and having a good time, but Nancy couldn’t seem to become interested in anything we were doing. She remained an outsider, never raising her hand to offer an answer, not wanting to answer even when I called on her. The class knew that I was tutoring her and they were jealous of the fact that she was living with me. They called her Miss Dumbbell and mimicked her by putting on sour faces when her back was turned. Once when I asked Jimmy Carew to read aloud, he did an imitation of her—slumping down in his seat and staring hard at his book, which he held upside down.

  The situation came to a head one afternoon close to dismissal when Nancy rose from her seat, went over to Jimmy and smacked him hard across the ear. Then she walked into my quarters, slamming the door behind her. Stunned, Jimmy fanned his smarting ear and tried to hold back the tears. Then he put on a surly expression that made the other children laugh. Asking the class to be quiet, I went in to talk to Nancy, but she was already out the front door and didn’t stop when I called her.

  It was well after supper when she came back, leaving the door open a few more seconds than necessary while she wiped some mud off her shoes. I’d propped a piece of mirror on the table and was sitting by the stove marcelling my hair. There was going to be a dance in the schoolroom the next night and I wanted to look my best. I asked her where she’d been.

  “Over to Joe Temple’s.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You think that was a good idea?”

  She shrugged and started to take off her parka.

  “We’re low on water,” I said. Ordinarily I’d have gotten it myself, but I was feeling mean.

  She made two trips, each time leaving the door ajar and letting the cold in. When she was done she sat down on the couch and stared into space, her eyes occasionally following the waving iron.

  “I asked you once before, Nancy, not to go over to Joe’s place alone.”

  “We just talked.”

  “I’m sure of that. But while you’re here you’re my responsibility. If I ask you not to do something there’s a reason for it.”

  We were silent for a few moments, then Nancy said, “He’s got Mary Angus for that, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Why did you have to slap Jimmy?” I said, changing the subject.

  “’cause he was taking me off, been taking me off for three days now.”

  “You could have told me. I’d’ve made him stop it.”

  “No need to now. He won’t be making faces anymore.”

  I decided not to put the decision off any longer.

  Finished with the iron, I started putting on a hair net, trying to think of a nice way to say what I was going to, but I couldn’t. “Nancy, I think we’ve both tried as hard as we can and we’re not getting anywhere.”

  She sat very still, her eyes meeting mine for a moment, then she stared down at the floor.

  “Maybe it would be a good idea,” I went on, “if you went home for ten days or so, give us both a rest. How would that be?”

  She didn’t answer. We both knew that if she left it would be permanent. An hour later I was studying my eighth-grade arithmetic, trying to figure out division of fractions, when she broke the silence. “You don’t like me one bit, do you?”

  “That’s not true,” I lied.

  “Then why you sending me home?”

  “I don’t think we’re doing each other any good.”

  “Just ’cause I slapped Jimmy Carew.”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “Well, then what is it? ’cause I won’t do all the scrubbin’ and cleanin’ you want?”

  “Nancy—”

  “Well, that’s not what I come here for,” she went on, deliberately using poor grammar. “I do enough a that at home. I come here so you could teach me to read and you sure ain’t done it.”

  “No, I ain’t” I said, beginning to lose my temper, “and the way you go around here I’ll never be able to. Not the way you are. You’re so busy being angry, you haven’t got room for anything else inside of you.” Nancy stared at me in surprise while the words poured out of me. “You’ve lived in this part of the country all your life, but when people stop by here to visit with us you won’t say a word to them. You won’t even look at them half the time. How do you think that makes them feel?”

  “What’m I supposed to say to ’em?”

  “Anything that comes into your head. It’s better than glaring at them. And if you can’t think of anything then just give ’em a smile. You’ve got a beautiful smile when you want to use it, you’ve got a beautiful face if you’d just wash it once in a while.” I stopped, sorry I’d said as much as I did. I hadn’t meant to. I calmed down. “When you came out here, Nancy, I was really glad to see you. I needed all the help you could give me, and you gave me a lot—at first. Now you won’t do anything—you won’t make the bed, you won’t pack water, you won’t even change your clothes unless I ask you. And when I do ask you to do something you look at me as though I’m being mean.”

  “My mother ain’t payin’ for me to cook and clean,” she said stoically. “She’s payin’ for you to tutor me.”

  It was my turn to be surprised. “Nancy, your mother isn’t paying me anything.”

  “What are you talkin’ about? I heard ’er tell you when you first came through that she’d pay you for takin’ me.”

  “Yes, she did. But I sent her a note back on the day you arrived. I told her she could forget about paying me.”

  She fought against believing me at first, but when I assured her it was true she went pale.

  “Why’d you do that?” she said. Her voice seemed to come from far away.

  “I was glad to have the company,” I said honestly. “I was afraid being here all by myself.” She looked so miserable that I wished I could think of something to console her. “I guess I should have told you,” I said finally.

  There was coffee in the coffeepot and I asked her if she wanted some. She shook her head. After I poured a cup for myself I sat down at the table again, feeling terrible.

  “Nancy, if you’d like to stay, maybe we could try again.”

  She got up and went to the window. She slowly rubbed some moisture from a pane and stared out into the darkness.

  Then she cried for a long time.

  X

  From then on Nancy changed. She hadn’t been one to show her feelings much before we had the argument, and she didn’t make any big display after it, but I could see the difference in her right away. Up to then I almost had to drag her out of bed in the morning. After that she was up when I was and sometimes even before. She was a dynamo, cleaning and washing, taking care of herself and doing so many chores that half a dozen times I had to tell her to slow down. She wouldn’t, though. The way she acted towards me you’d have thought that my letting her stay with me without getting paid for it made me some kind of a heroine.

  I kept complimenting her all over the place and she just glowed. She hardly ever looked me straight in the eye, and she wouldn’t smile because of the cavities in her front teeth. I could tell she was pleased, though.

  After a few days we sat down and had a good talk, something we’d never done before. I told her I appreciated everything she was doing, but I didn’t want her wearing herself out. She said I wasn’t to worry about that. “I just want to show you I appreciate what you did for me,” she said, picking at some loose threads on her o
veralls. It was a habit she had that used to drive me crazy, always giving her attention to something else when you talked with her, as if she didn’t really care what you were saying. She did, though. She just didn’t know how to show it.

  I tried to tell her I didn’t do any more for her than Miss Ivy had done for me—a heck of a lot less, really, because I needed her help—but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “You did more for me than anybody in my whole life,” she insisted, “and I’m not forgetting it.”

  “If you really feel that way there’s one way you could pay me back,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Be a little more friendly with the kids in class.”

  “Won’t do any good. They don’t take to me.”

  “They would if you gave them the chance. They’re a little afraid of you.” I told her that she could act as sort of my assistant, like a helping teacher.

  “Some helping teacher,” she said, pulling out a thread she’d been worrying, “I can’t even read.”

  “Nancy, you can read. All you have to do is give up that old crazy system you made up. Sit down and learn how to break words up into sounds and I guarantee you’ll be reading inside of a month. Then you’ll really be my assistant.”

  She didn’t promise anything, and I didn’t expect too much, so I was really surprised when she not only buckled down to work, but in her own way tried to be nicer to the other kids. Before, whenever she was in class she wouldn’t budge for anybody. Now she started getting up to close the stove door whenever the classroom became too hot, or open it when it was chilly. When a few of the “books” the children had made started falling apart, she fixed them. She took them over to the roadhouse and sewed the pages together on Maggie Carew’s machine, then shoved them at the kids with a gruff, “Here, I fixed ’em for ya.” She was tops in arithmetic too, so one morning I asked her if she’d help Jimmy with his multiplication tables. She and Jimmy hadn’t said a word to each other since she’d slapped him and neither of them looked too keen about the idea. I sent them into my quarters to work, and when I glanced through the door a few minutes later she was tutoring him as if she’d done it all her life.

  After she helped Jimmy the class was less leery of her. She even made up a game—a multiplication clock, she called it. It was a clock made out of cardboard with one hand on it, and she’d move the hand from one number to the next while the kids multiplied by two, or three, or five. After a while, we used a stopwatch to see how fast each of the children could do it.

  She really blossomed. It didn’t take more than a couple of weeks before some of the kids were taking a shine to her. During recess, when it was too cold for the little ones like Joan and Willard to go out, I let her supervise the older kids outside while the little ones played in the schoolroom. In private I told her that I’d appreciate it if she’d watch out for Chuck. The other kids didn’t pick on him as much as they had when he first came, but once in a while they still reminded him he wasn’t as good as they were, especially the Vaughn twins.

  She watched out for him better than I could. During one recess I heard him start to cry outside and I went to the door. I opened it just in time to see Nancy give Eleanor Vaughn a shove that made her sit down on her behind fast. She’d have done the same with Evelyn if Evelyn hadn’t danced out of the way. They must have washed Chuck’s face with snow because it was all red and wet. None of them saw me, so I figured I’d let Nancy handle it. She was tougher than the two of them put together.

  “You keep your hands off this kid from here on,” Nancy said to Evelyn, putting a mitten on Chuck’s shoulder.

  “Since when you sticking up for siwashes?” Eleanor said, getting up.

  “I’m not stickin’ up for ’em anymore ’n I’d stick up for you,” Nancy answered. “The teacher says you keep your hands off, so keep your hands off.”

  “You don’t have any right to tell us what do do,” Eleanor sneered.

  “That’s right,” Evelyn said.

  “I’m not tellin’ you what to do. I’m just tellin’ you that if you lay your hands on this kid again I’m gonna bash your head in.”

  They left Chuck alone from then on.

  I guessed I was never so happy in my life as around that time. Everything just seemed the way I’d dreamed it would be—the settlement and all the country around hushed under a thick white blanket, the snow dry enough so you could walk around in moccasins and never get wet. Now I realized what the North was really like. It was made for winter, because winter was when everything went on. You could ski any place you wanted to and get there twice as fast and twice as easily as you could before there was snow. People went out and brought in the trees they’d cut for firewood and left lying until they could use sleds to haul them. The whole country just opened right up. You could hear somebody talking on the trail half a mile away, or dropping a pan on the stove a mile from the settlement. It was so quiet and open and free that it was like being let out of prison. It put everybody in good spirits and they went around looking the way the country did—clean and fresh.

  Came lunchtime, the class was usually out of the room like a shot, and fifteen minutes later, after bolting their lunch, the kids were outside with sleds and skis. I learned how to ski in no time at all. I’d done a little when I was a kid, but that was just with barrel staves. It wasn’t anything like real skiing. Once I learned I was as anxious as the class to get out and slide the hills.

  The one thing I would have liked to learn was skijoring—holding onto a string of dogs and letting them pull you—but I wasn’t any good at it. Fred was expert at it and he tried to teach me a couple of times, but the dogs kept pulling me off balance. Finally, on the second try, he told me he was going to work something out where that wouldn’t happen. “You be ready next Saturday morning,” he said when I asked him what it was. “I’ll be by around ten.”

  Almost on the dot I heard him call my name, and when I opened the door he was out there on his own skis, waiting. He’d brought his favorite lead dog, Pancake, and two others. “You ready?”

  It wasn’t that cold out, so I threw on a canvas parka with a warm sweater underneath. Outside on the porch I started to take my skis, but he said leave them. Then I saw what he’d done. He’d fitted an extra pair of straps on his own skis so I could stand behind him.

  “You think it’ll work?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never tried it.”

  Nancy watched from the doorway while I got on, and I had the barest second to wave to her before he yelled “Mush!” and we were off.

  We didn’t go too fast at first because the dogs weren’t able to dig into the packed-down snow of the settlement. Once we were on the trail, though, we speeded up. Then Fred began to sing Sweet Rosie O’Grady to them and they began to pull like sixty. Everybody had a different way of making sled dogs pull. Some used a whip. Others, like Angela Barrett, yelled and cursed at them all the time. Her dogs were so used to it that they wouldn’t pull unless she swore at them, so you could hear her coming from a half-mile away. Fred sang to his and they loved it

  “No singing!” I yelled.

  “Why not?”

  “We’re going too fast.”

  “We haven’t even started.”

  “Fred, we’ll fall!”

  “No we won’t!”

  I held onto his parka as tight as I could, his skis crunching under us. The dogs were thirty feet ahead, the full length of the lead rope. If they geed or hawed all of a sudden I knew I was going to be dumped.

  But I hung on. Skiing was fun, but it wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as this.

  After a while I started to congratulate myself. I was doing pretty well. I leaned into turns easily and could key my movements to Fred’s, as if we were on a bicycle built for two. We must have gone half a mile before I got so cocky I didn’t look where we were going.

  The trail took a sharp turn. Fred leaned to the left, I dragged him off to the right, and we
went flying.

  Luckily we ended up in a drift, laughing. We didn’t bother to get up right away, just lay back where we fell. “You all right?” Fred asked.

  “Perfect. Maybe I’ll take a nap.” I propped myself up on my elbows, watching the dogs. They’d taken a spill too, and a couple of them were tangled in the lead lines. They were well trained, though, and didn’t get excited about it Pancake was a beauty, brown mask over a gray wolf face and slanted ice-blue eyes. Panting, he went to Fred as though he’d done something wrong, his tail down and his rear end moving from side to side.

  “Look at that He thinks it was his fault,” Fred said. He sat up and started untangling the rope.

  “Well, whose fault was it?” “Yours.”

  “I knew I’d be blamed.”

  “Better than blaming Pancake.” He rubbed the dog’s head. “He’ll feel bad.”

  “How about me?”

  “You can take it.”

  I picked up a gob of snow and tossed it at him. He blocked it easily and it went to powder, then shoveling up a bigger gob, he hefted it high in the air. It plopped down on the hood of my parka and most of it stayed there.

  “You look like a tree,” he said.

  “Nicest thing you ever said to me.”

  I looked up at the blue sky. It was still early, but the sun was low, skimming the distant mountain tops and sending out long blue shadows from the trees.

  I watched Fred while he straightened out the harness. He’d been out on the traplines the week before and he was brown as a coffee bean. I’d really liked being so close to him on the skis and I wondered if he felt the same thing about me. I had a feeling he did. Even if he did, though, he didn’t show it. It was the way he always acted with me. Careful. So far all he’d done was hold my hand once when we were alone. We never talked about it, but I knew full well why he was being so careful. He’d swallowed a lot of that half-breed baloney people around here were always slicing and it made him keep his distance from me, as if he wasn’t as good as the next boy and I was something special. If he’d been pure white he’d have acted a whole lot different.