Tisha (18 page)

It didn’t do any good. She just didn’t seem to be interested in learning the way I could teach her. If I asked her why she hadn’t finished something, she’d say she didn’t understand it, and no amount of explaining could get her to.

I started to think that maybe she didn’t like me, but she didn’t seem to like anybody else either—especially the oldtimers. They’d been a big help to the class with our project, and had invited us over to their cabins when we went out on our field trips. We learned a lot from them about how they lived in the old days. Mert Atwood even showed us how they used to make butter. He brought over some caribou horns that he’d sawed up into lengths almost a foot long. We put them in a big pot and boiled them for almost three days, then we took them out and let the water cool. After a couple of hours, just as he said it would, a couple of inches of white butter formed at the top. It tasted good, too.

But Nancy didn’t take to the old-timers. The only person she did like was Joe Temple. One time she went over to his cabin and stayed there for quite a while. I hadn’t even known she’d been there until Uncle Arthur mentioned it to me. I spoke with her about it and asked her not to do it again. She said she wouldn’t, but she was surly about it.

Mert came over after school one day, and after he’d
visited with us for a while he took off his yachtsman’s cap and removed an envelope from it.

“Got this here letter th’other day,” he said to me, “but I’m shipwrecked if I can find my glasses. Can’t read a thing without ’em. Maybe you wouldn’t mind readin’ it for me.”

I knew he couldn’t read and didn’t want to admit it, so I told him I’d be glad to. When I was finished Mert thanked me and put the letter back in the envelope.

Innocently, he asked Nancy how she was coming along with her reading.

“Hell of a lot better’n you ever did with yours,” she said belligerently.

Stung by the remark, Mert smiled tolerantly. I tried to make conversation after that, but it didn’t do any good. “Well,” Mert said after a couple of minutes, “time to lift anchor and shove off.”

“You really hurt that old man’s feelings, Nancy,” I said after he was gone.

“Well he hurt mine too.”

“He was only trying to be sociable. He didn’t mean anything.”

“I didn’t ask him to talk to me, didn’t ask him to come here either.”

“Nobody asked him. He just came because he’s lonely and he likes to talk with us.”

“Well let’m be lonely some place else. He’s like all them other old windbags, dirty and smelly and always braggin’ about how they’re gonna get rich some day and the things they’re gonna do when they are. They’re not gonna do any of them things ever. They’re just wastin’ time jawin’ and I’m not about to let’m waste my time.”

She didn’t like it either when I gave Chuck a bath, acting as if he was just about the lowest thing she ever saw. She didn’t say anything the first time, but the second time she said that we ought to make him haul in the snow himself. “Unless you fancy waitin’ on siwashes,” she said.

I tried to kid her. “Ah, come on, he’s only a little boy.”

“You can’t even turn around here without trippin’ over ’im.”

“He likes it here.”

“Between him and all them other kids you’d think this was a roadhouse.”

She didn’t like the idea that the kids were always trooping in and out. Even after school they’d come over sometimes to work on something they hadn’t finished in class or to play in the school room. I didn’t mind it at all, but I could see how it would get on her nerves, so I tried to discourage them from coming into my quarters and get them to stay in the schoolroom instead.

But things kept going from bad to worse between us. I’d heard about some of the feuds that people who shared cabins sometimes got into and I’d always thought they were funny—like Harry Dowles and his wife moving into separate cabins and never talking to each other. I’d found out that even Uncle Arthur and Mert Atwood had been cabin-mates until one winter when they had an argument. They split everything up evenly and what they couldn’t split they cut in half just for spite. They even cut their stove in half, Ben Norvall had told me, and the two of them nearly froze to death.

Now I could understand how that could happen. When you lived in close quarters with someone and you weren’t getting along, everything that person did annoyed you. Sometimes it was all you could do to keep your temper. That’s what was happening with Nancy and me. We finally got to the point where she wasn’t even saying good morning unless I said it first.

A couple of weeks after she arrived Mary Angus came over one Saturday to bring me a pair of moccasins she’d made for me. She brought Chuck and Ethel with her. She didn’t look well at all. Her cheeks were all flushed and there were dark circles under her eyes. I introduced her to Nancy, but Nancy just sat where she was at the kitchen table, sipping some hot cocoa, and hardly even looked up. Mary didn’t want to, but I made her sit down and have some tea while I tried on the moccasins. As soon as she did Nancy got right up and went over to the couch.

The moccasins were beautiful. They were winter moccasins, with good sturdy moosehide below the ankle and caribou with the fur turned out up to the knee. She’d beaded them with dyed porcupine quills and trimmed the tops with rabbit fur. They fit perfectly too, but after I took a look at the beat-up moccasins on her own feet I didn’t feel so good.

The three of them didn’t stay long. While they were there, I gave Chuck his favorite—a slice of my “brode,” as he called it, smeared with butter and honey. I gave one to Ethel too.

As soon as she bit into it Chuck started to bawl her out in Indian. She stopped with her mouth full, looking at him wide-eyed, while he pointed to me. Finally looking up at me she said something like “Oo.” Chuck patted her. “Ver’ good. She not got good manners, Tisha. I teach her say T’ank you.”

“I’m proud of you, Chuck,” I said. I was too. I’d been teaching him to say thank you when somebody handed him something or did something for him.

After they all left Nancy said, “You shouldn’ta done that, Teacher.” I’d told her a couple of times she could call me Anne, but she wouldn’t.

“Done what?” I asked her.

“Had ’er to the table.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“People around here don’t even let siwashes into the house much less sit down with ’em to the table.”

“Then they ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

She didn’t say anything to that and I was glad she didn’t. I was mad enough so that we’d have had a stem-winder, and things were bad enough between us already.

We both started to get petty. It was her job to see to it that we always had enough wood and water on hand. But when we ran low on them a couple of times, I had to remind her. After the second time she said it might be a good idea for us to take turns doing it.

“I’ve been leaving it to you,” I told her, “because I figure you can do it better than I can.” I also figured I was making up for it by tutoring her at night, but I didn’t mention that.

She didn’t say anything, but after I had to remind her a couple more times I got the hint. Finally we took turns washing the linens, sweeping, doing the dishes and everything else.

I hadn’t planned it that way at all. I was in the schoolroom almost all day and I’d sometimes be working long after supper planning lessons and activities. I’d thought that Nancy would help me out the way I’d helped out Miss Ivy. But it wasn’t working out that way. I had as much to do as I had before, and besides that I had to put up with someone I liked less every day. When I’d passed through her parents’ roadhouse it was clean as a whistle, and so was Nancy at first. But after a while she was leaving her old dirty clothes hanging on nails or over a chair and didn’t bother to wash them until they smelled as gamey as Ben Norvall’s. If I mentioned it to her she’d put them all in a pile and keep them out of sight, but she didn’t wash them any more often than she did before.

I mentioned the situation to Mr. Strong one day while we were going over the accounts in his store. “It’s too bad,” he said. “I was hoping that maybe getting away from her family would be of some help to her.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She’s simply been worked too hard too long, madam. She’s a good girl, but she’s never had a chance. Her mother’s been driving that girl ever since I can remember—made a slave out of her.”

“If I could just get her to talk …”

“Can’t get a word out of anyone in that family. All I can tell you is, she hasn’t had it easy. You saw that roadhouse her folks run, the nice way they keep it. Well, they do it by making those kids of theirs hop. Nancy practically raised her two brothers by herself, and when she wasn’t taking care of them she was working the garden or making beds or doing something else—but look, that’s none of your affair. Send her on home if you can’t take it.”

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.”