Tisha (13 page)

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.

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.

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.”