Tisha Page 6

  Living with her had been like living with another little girl who was just older and smarter than I was. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t do, except maybe handle a plow. At home my father had never let me help him because he said that I couldn’t do anything right, but Granny had let me help with everything—milking the cow, tending the chickens, cooking and baking. She even let me help plant the vegetable garden, another thing my father wouldn’t let me do. I couldn’t keep the rows straight, he used to tell me. But Granny said she didn’t give a hoot about straight rows. The potatoes I planted in her garden grew all over, sometimes crossing into the spinach, which curved around behind the tomatoes. It was less of a garden than a living salad, but when it all came out of the ground Granny couldn’t get over how smart I was to have performed such a miracle, or so she told me.

  I’d lived with her for a whole year that last time, and I’d never forget how terrible I’d felt when my mother finally wrote me to come home because my father was working again. Granny couldn’t read, so I’d even thought of not telling her what was in the letter, but I couldn’t He to her. She felt as bad as I did, but there wasn’t anything we could do.

  That last night we’d spent together we tried to pretend that it was just like any other night. We went to bed right after supper the way we always did and I read to her from the Bible for a while. I knew the Book of Psalms was her favorite, so I was reading from that. Granny had decided she couldn’t abide beds after my grandfather died, so we were lying on thick patchwork quilts on the floor. It was warm enough so that we didn’t need a blanket, and she was curled up beside me, her knees pulled up and poking at her cotton nightie, her hair done in a long braid down to her waist. Her eyes were closed, and after a while I thought she was asleep, so I put the Bible away.

  Before I leaned over to turn down the oil lamp I looked at her face, seeing the deep lines in it. It was so dark and looked so Indian that I could almost imagine her living in a tepee, sewing hides and things like that. She wasn’t asleep, though. Her eyes popped open and she smiled at me. She was a tiny little thing, thin in the shoulders and heavy in the waist. Even though I was only eleven I was bigger than she was.

  “You fooled me,” I said.

  It was a game we played sometimes. If she fell asleep while I was reading I could go without washing my hands and face the next morning. But if she caught me I had to wash my neck and my ears.

  “No, I jus’ dozed off. I really did.”

  She took my hand and squeezed it. I could feel the calluses on hers. “I’m gonna miss you, Annie.”

  I’d tried hard not to whine or cry up to then, but I couldn’t keep it up. I managed to blurt out, “Granny, I don’t want to go home ever again. I just don’t want to. Please let me stay.” Then I started to bawl so hard I didn’t think I’d ever be able to stop. Granny got up and held onto me the whole time. She didn’t say a word until she knew I was done.

  “Annie …”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know I don’t want you to go home …”

  “Yes.”

  “An’ you know I never told you a lie.”

  “I know.”

  “Then you know if I tell you you’re a lucky girl, that’s the truth.”

  “How can I be lucky?”

  “’cause a lot of people when they unhappy, they can’t do nothin’ about it. But you can, ’cause you’re smart. You got brains. An’ when a person’s got brains they got a ticket to any place they want to go—a ticket to the whole world.”

  “What kind of a ticket?”

  She tapped her head. “Right up here. Didn’t you tell me that if you was to work hard an’ really study you could be teachin’ school by the time you’re sixteen?”

  “That’s what my teacher said.”

  “Then that’s what you got to think about, about bein’ a teacher an’ gettin’ outta them dirty minin’ places.”

  “I’ll never be able to do it, Granny, never.” I was ready to start crying all over again, but Granny told me to stop right away. “An’ listen to me, ’cause I ain’t gonna say this twice.”

  She told me to sit up. “You’re gonna do big things some day, Annie—real big things. But you can’t do them big things if you’re gonna go round feelin’ sorry for yourself.” She stopped for a second and she looked a little sad. “Your pa’s my son, child. He ain’t an easy man, but he ain’t a bad man neither. Whatever you think about ’im you just remember he always stood on his own two feet an’ he learned you the same. An’ he always paid his own way. That’s what the Hobbses is like—all of ’em. Maybe him and your ma ain’t been too understandin’ of you, but they fed you good an’ give you a roof. That’s more than many’s got …”

  “But they don’t really want me, Granny.”

  “Yes they do. They jus’ don’t know how to show it. But never mind that. If you got just one person in the whole world who loves you an’ believes in you, why that’s wonderful, don’t ya see. An’ you got one—me. I love you, an’ I believe in you. So anytime you get to thinkin’ you ain’t gonna make it, or that you can’t do somethin’ for your own selfs sake, you do it for my sake. Will you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “That’s what I want to hear. You’ll see, Annie. Some day you’re gonna go off to a new land just like a pioneer—just like your grampa an’ me did. ’cause you’re that kind—a big person. An’ that’s the kind that goes to a new land.”

  “But there’s no new lands, Granny. They’re all gone.”

  “Shoot, child, there always be new lands.”

  “Where?”

  “California maybe, I don’t know. Or Alaska … Now there’s a new land, Alaska.”

  I asked her what she knew about it, but she’d begun to get sleepy and so had I. A few minutes later we were asleep.

  “Madam?” Mr. Strong had finished checking the animals over and had mounted up again. “I asked you if you are ready.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I am.”

  As we moved forward I thought of that last morning I’d spent with Granny. When it was close to train time a neighboring woman had ridden into the yard with a buckboard. Granny had gone as far as the main road with us, then we hugged each other good-bye. She’d felt like a strong little bird.

  As the buckboard drove off and I turned around to see her waving to me I had to fight to hold in the tears. “Don’t worry,” the driver said, “you’ll be back some day.”

  I hadn’t answered her, not knowing how to explain that I wasn’t crying because I was going away, but because my grandmother had looked so small and alone as she stood in the middle of the road gently waving good-bye.

  I’d never seen her again after that. She’d died during the first year I’d been teaching. I hadn’t found out about it until three weeks after it happened. She had died in her sleep, my mother wrote me, and she had left me a legacy.

  She sure had, but it wasn’t the legacy my mother had written me about. It was one she’d given me a long time ago when I needed it most. And for that I’d never forget her.

  “You’d best keep a tight rein on him, madam,” Mr. Strong was saying. As soon as we’d broken into the open, just as he’d predicted, the pack train speeded up and so did Blossom. I pulled back on the reins.

  We’d descended into a small level valley. About a quarter of a mile ahead were maybe twenty-five or thirty buildings strung along the same side of the creek we were on.

  “Is that all of it?”

  “Just about.”

  I’d imagined it would be something like Eagle—a town—but from this distance it looked more like the Indian village we’d gone through. It couldn’t have been built in a better place, though, set down snug on the valley floor. Low hills ringed the valley, rolling away from it into a blue haze of high mountain peaks. The creek was deep and narrow here, spilling down from the slope behind us. It got wider as it went, and right smack in the middle of the
settlement a wooden bridge arched across it.

  Blossom was just aching to break into a gallop and I had all I could do to hold him to a walk. It must have rained here recently, because halfway there we started winding around craters filled with muddy water.

  “Keep away from those holes, madam,” Mr. Strong cautioned me sharply when Blossom came close to one. “Some of them are deep. Fall in and you’re liable not to come out.”

  I told Chuck to be careful too, then I asked Mr. Strong what they were.

  “Prospect holes. Some of them go down forty feet. These miners don’t bother to fill them up after they’ve dug them.”

  The ground was pock-marked with them all the way into the settlement and the ground got muddier as we went.

  “Looks like everybody’s waiting for us,” I said. There was a whole crowd of people, maybe twenty or thirty, gathered in front of a tiny cabin. It wasn’t much bigger than a hut, but with the American flag fluttering over it I figured it for the post office.

  “They don’t have much else to do but wait. It’s a big day for them. The women curl their hair, everyone spruces up. Some of them even take a bath.”

  Whether he was being sarcastic or not, I started grinning. The sweet fragrance of wood smoke wafted over and I felt proud enough to burst. I’d really done it, I thought, I was really a caution. I’d traveled through the wilderness just the way Granny Hobbs had done. Now here I was riding toward a frontier settlement as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Mr. Strong saw the look on my face and he smiled.

  “What do you think of it?”

  “It looks wonderful,” I said.

  It wasn’t anything like the Indian village at all. The street between the creek and settlement was wide, with patches of late grass here and there, no tin cans, no trash. Even from here I could see vegetable gardens in a few backyards, along with dog kennels and stacks of corded wood. As soon as we neared the edge of the place the crowd started calling and waving. Between their hollering and sled dogs doing the same thing in their own way you’d have thought it was the Fourth of July.

  The whole place was about three city blocks long, the post office right in the middle, opposite the wooden bridge. The first couple of cabins were a letdown. They were in bad shape, one just a rotted skeleton, roof gone and weeds spilling out the door, the other all boarded up. As far as I could make out, a few others down the line weren’t lived in either. The ones that were lived in, though, were solid and sturdy, with traps, harness, washtubs and all kinds of stuff hanging from posts and railings. One of them even had a dogsled leaning against the side of it.

  No sooner did we pass the first few cabins than Blossom broke into a jog and I couldn’t hold him back. We jittered past a cabin that had a young birch tree growing from the sod roof, then almost ran into half a caribou carcass that was hanging from a tripod. Blossom was heading right for the stable, which was on the creek side of the road a little beyond the crowd. Somebody was way ahead of him, though. A man in knee-length boots ran out to cut him off, yelling and waving a beat-up fedora. Blossom gave up. It was too muddy for him to risk trying to dodge, so he just slowed down and ambled up to the crowd as though that’s where he was headed all along.

  A little old man appeared under him and grabbed his rein. “Steady as she goes.” He smiled up at me from under the brim of a yachtsman’s cap, a shrunken pug-nose face and teeth stained from chewing tobacco. “There y’are,” he said, “safe in port. Hop right on down, little lady.”

  “Goddamn fool,” another old man said to him. “Can’t ya see she can’t make it by herself? Wait’ll I get a box.”

  Everybody who hadn’t moved out to stop the pack animals and help Mr. Strong unload them stood around and stared up at me. If I hadn’t been in Alaska for a couple of weeks I wouldn’t have realized that most people were wearing their dress-up clothes. But now I was used to how drab everybody looked and how old-fashioned their clothes were, so I knew that even though the men’s shirts were wrinkled and you could hardly tell what the original color was, the fact that they had a tie on meant they were dressed up.

  Chuck had found his mother, I saw—a slight dark Indian woman who had a little girl by the hand. From the quick glimpse I caught of her as she kneeled down to hug him she looked like a beauty.

  I kept smiling and getting smiles in return. A heavy-set Indian woman wearing a shawl gave me a big grin and waved. She had a little girl with her—half-white, I could see. I waved back to her. There were a few other children around, and one little boy in a gray cap and knickers looked away when I smiled at him.

  I tried to figure out which building was the school-house, finally realizing that it had to be a big frame house with a homemade flagpole in front of it. It was opposite the stable a little further up. Mr. Strong had described it to me and I knew that my living quarters were in it too, so I was glad to see that it was larger than Cathy’s place.

  The second old man came back with a box and set it down. “Here you be, missis.” He was almost hunchbacked, he was so stooped over, with a beard that hung from him like weeping willow.

  What with everything else that had gone wrong on this famous trip, I should have known I wasn’t going to make a dignified entrance. I let one foot down while the bearded man tried to steady me. As soon as I put my weight on the box it collapsed right under me and the next thing I knew I was sitting in the mud and everybody was staring down at me. I could hear a couple of the kids laughing and I was so embarrassed I wanted to disappear right then and there.

  The old men helped me up and fussed around trying to get some of the mud off me until they were pushed aside by a big burly woman.

  “Awright, awright, for Chrissake. Leave ’er alone before you wind up killin’ ’er. I’m Angela Barrett,” she announced. “You’re the new schoolmom, I take it. What’s yer moniker?”

  I told her, and she led me over to another woman who was wearing a long navy blue coat buttoned up to the neck. She had a broken nose. “She’s the new schoolmom, awright,” Angela said to the woman.

  “I’m Maggie Carew,” tie woman said. “What’s your name, honey?”

  “Anne Hobbs.” My skirt was clinging in back of me and I could feel water trickling down my legs. I just hoped it didn’t make me look ridiculous.

  “Let’s get you over to the schoolhouse.”

  I’d been right about which building it was. When we stepped up onto the porch, Angela Barrett moved to the closer of two doors. It was studded with mean-looking nails that stuck out about three inches. “This here’s the schoolroom,” she said, opening it. “The other door there’s to your quarters. Watch out for them nails.”

  As I followed her in my heart sank. The room was big, but it wasn’t like any schoolroom I ever saw, and it was in a shambles. A few assorted tables and chairs were piled in one corner, and some boxes in yet another corner held old books and papers. Piles of dust and dirt were everywhere, and a few yellowed papers littered the floor, mice droppings all over them. The plank flooring was buckled and warped, higher in the center than it was at the walls. The tables and chairs all sat at an angle and I felt seasick just looking at them. Light came in through windows fogged with smoke and grime.

  “Needs a little cleaning up,” Maggie admitted, “but I’ll give you a hand with it.” Her broken nose made her look tough, but I had a feeling she was pretty decent. I guessed she was about forty.

  The other room was neater, the same size as the schoolroom, but except for a brass bed that had no mattress, two chairs, and a big potbellied stove, it was empty.

  “How do you like ’er?” Angela Barrett asked. She must have weighed two hundred pounds and she towered over me. Her voice was rasping, and there was a red rash on her nose and all around it. I tried to think of something nice to say.

  “It’s a good big room.”

  “Glad you feel that way,” Angela said. “You’re the one’s gonna be livin’ in it.”

  “Do you think it will take much tim
e to get it ready?”

  “What do you mean ready?” Angela asked. “It’s ready now.”

  Both women were staring at me as if there was something wrong with me. I was almost afraid to ask the next question. “Don’t I have to have a mattress?” I said. “Or blankets, or a table?”

  It took a moment before they seemed to realize that I had a point

  “Where’na hell’d it all go?” Angela said, as if she’d turned her back for a minute and somebody had snatched everything away. “It’s your fault, Maggie, you’re the school janitor. It’s your responsibility.”

  “When there’s no school there’s no janitor,” Maggie said tartly, “and there ain’t been a school here in well over a year.”

  “What are we gonna do?” Angela said.

  Maggie thought for a minute. “Come on,” she said finally.

  Angela and I followed her outside. At the post office, almost all the pack animals had been unloaded. The stuff everyone had ordered was lying on the ground: boxes of candles and flashlight batteries, sacks of flour, crated gasoline cans and cans of kerosene, tied-up bundles of dried fish and a whole bunch of packages of parcel post.

  “How about my cornflakes?” the bearded old man who’d tried to help me was saying to Mr. Strong. He could just straighten up enough to look Mr. Strong in the eye. “I had a dozen boxes of cornflakes on order an’ you didn’t bring ’em.”

  “They’ll arrive in due time, Mr. Spratt.”

  “That’s what you told me the last three times. I ordered them cornflakes by parcel post four months ago an’ they should be here. You got ’em stuck there in the warehouse at Eagle, now don’t ya?”

  A lot of people were beginning to mutter that the old man was right, and Mr. Strong was getting mad. “You heard what I said, Mr. Spratt.”