Tisha (45 page)

“No more.”

“Why?”

“I hate you, Tisha,” he said simply. “You not nice me. Alla time you
sahnik
me.”

Ethel woke up, innocent and beautiful as the morning. She stared at me the way he had.

“Am I angry at you all the time?”

“Alla time. Alla time angry me, angry Et’el too.”

“Does Ethel hate me as much as you do?”

“More. Say you white devil-woman. Make scare her. She no more live with you too. We live with Indian mudda. She like us.”

“Chuck, will you believe me if I tell you something? I love you. I love you very much. You and Ethel.”

“Tisha, you tell one very big He.”

“I’m not lying at all. I mean it.”

“Oh, no. You hate me, say I bad boy. All time bad boy.” He was getting aggravated.

“Is that what I do?”

“Foreva! All day long you say, ‘Chuck, you bad boy, you make floor dirty. Oh, Chuck, you bad boy, you make mud all over clothes. Chuck, you not have good manners, dirty, make table dirty, make big mess, make everything dirty.’ Tisha,” he spluttered, “soon you tell me I make whole world dirty!”

I didn’t want to cry, but what he said next cut the ground from under me.

“Once upon a time, Tisha, you be nice me. You be so nice I love you truly.” He shook his head. “No now. Now you shame me. Shame way I talk. Shame everything me. You no love me, Tisha. You hate me.”

He said it so simply and honestly that I burst into tears, ashamed of myself. Before I was able to stop, I was sitting on the dirt floor, he and Ethel worriedly patting me. Then we talked. He told me how much I’d picked on him and tried to get him to do things in the past month that were too tough, and the longer we talked the more I realized he was right. I’d been ashamed of him, and of Ethel too. In class I gave everybody extra help but him. At lunchtime I asked
nobody else to mind their manners but him. It didn’t matter why I’d done it. I’d been wrong. Instead of hugs and pats for the things he’d accomplished I’d given him criticism for the things he hadn’t.

In the end he and Ethel came home with me, and I promised him things would be different.

That night when I put him to bed he told me that once when he was in the Indian village he’d chopped twenty cords of wood. I’d lectured him more than once about telling the truth, but this time I kept my mouth shut. I must have shown my doubt, though.

“You no believe,” he said.

“Oh, yes I do,” I assured him.

He wasn’t convinced. “You think I tell helluva lie.”

“Let me feel your muscle.” He flexed his arm, and gritted his teeth. “That’s some muscle, all right. If you say you cut twenty cords I believe you.”

He smiled and hunched down, pulling the covers up to his chin. “I fool you,” he said. “I not cut twenty cords. Too much for me myself.”

“No?”

“No,” he said. “Maybe cut ten.”

After that I stopped trying to make Chuck and Ethel into model children. All I had to do was remember how Granny Hobbs used to be with me and I knew exactly what to do. The last thing she’d ever cared about was my etiquette or my cleanliness. The first thing she’d cared about was making sure I was happy. And that’s what I did with Chuck and Ethel. If they weren’t the cleanest kids and didn’t have the best manners, they weren’t the dirtiest either and their
manners were better than most, so I stopped worrying about it. I stopped worrying about their messing up my quarters, too. Granny would never have given a hoot about something like that, and when it came right down to it I didn’t either. As for what other people might think about it, there was nobody I cared that much about impressing anyway, except maybe Fred, so I let them go ahead and mess.

They tested me a few times. They spilled things, splashed water from the barrel and insisted on wearing the same clothes for too long, wanting to see what I’d do. When I didn’t pay any attention to it they stopped by themselves. In fact, about a week after they ran away, when I was dumping some of my own clothes in the wash boiler, Ethel came up to me with a little blue dress that was her favorite.

“What do you want me to do with it?” I asked her.

“Do.”

“Do what?” I knew full well what she wanted, but I loved to hear her talk.

She pointed to the wash boiler. “Do?”

“Wash? You want me to wash it?”

“Yiss,” she said. “Watch.”

She followed Chuck’s lead and literally worshiped him. If he was happy she was happy. And he seemed to be. It hadn’t taken much to please him in the first place, and once he felt I was on his side he settled right down. He had a good sense of humor, too. One time when Jimmy Carew stayed to have lunch with us, Chuck asked for a slice of “brode,” as he called it.

“Brode,” Jimmy mimicked sarcastically. “It’s not brode, it’s
bread!”
He chuckled. “Brode …”

Isabelle and Joan were having lunch. They started to laugh, and Chuck shot me a quick glance.

“What’s wrong with saying brode?” I asked Jimmy.

“It’s just wrong.”

“Well, where my grandmother used to live in Missouri, the people used to say brayd. Mr. O’Shaughnessy pronounces it brid. What’s the difference as long as people know what you’re talking about?”

Jimmy shrugged uncomfortably. I hadn’t been too
fair to him, but Chuck needed the points more than he did. I put a slice of bread on the plate. “Here’s your brode,” I said.

“Brode not correct,” Chuck said archly, imitating me, “we say bread.”

After they’d been back another week, he and Ethel no more wanted to live with anybody else than I’d have wanted to marry Mr. Vaughn. They were with me for good.

It was just around then, in mid-May, that spring came. Up to then the weather had been so changeable you couldn’t tell what to expect. March had really been freakish. One day the sun would be out hot and strong—bouncing off the snow, dazzling your eyes and setting eaves to dripping—and you’d be convinced spring was on the way. The next day, and for days after that, gray monster winter would settle back in and you’d be just as convinced that spring would never arrive at all.

April had been a darling. With the class wanting to get in all the last-minute sledding they could, I’d had trouble getting them back in school after lunch. Water had been drip-dripping everywhere, and wet shoes and socks were always drying around the stove. Soon the first crocuses, purple faces splashed with yellow, had pushed up through the snow, and blossoming Crowfoot cascaded down hillsides. After that the creek broke up and everybody became restless. Spring still hadn’t been close enough so that we’d been able to shed our winter underwear, and sleds had still creaked by in the half-dusk that was night, but it was closer. It was there in the brown spots that appeared on the hills, and the islands that eddied out around trees. People had scattered ashes in their backyards to melt the snow faster so they could start planting vegetable gardens, and pale green buds sprouted on birches.

Then spring exploded. The sun came and stayed, and soon we were able to open the schoolroom windows to the tangy smell of running sap and the spicy odor of willow. Sometimes we’d run out just to see the great flocks of Canadian honkers passing overhead, the
loud beating of their wings making the air seem thick as water. The schoolroom felt so musty and confining that I was as glad as the class when Friday came and we could toss our books away. Each long sunny day blended into warm mild dusk, dusk into gentle morning.

And suddenly the snow was gone. Tender shoots of grass sprinkled the hills and wild canaries flashed through trees haloed in green. I started taking the class on field trips again and we’d see rabbits all over the place, their white winter coats already turned ash brown. On one trip we saw a moose, gaunt and needing a haircut badly. It was a bull, his racks still fuzzed with winter white. We even started our own garden. I wouldn’t be around when it came up, but it was fun just the same.

At the end of May Nancy came back to take the territorial exam. She took it in my quarters on the last morning school was held, while I rehearsed the class in the schoolroom for the pageant we were going to put on after lunch. For the whole time she sat behind the closed door I was on pins and needles. Even though I knew she’d pass I couldn’t help worrying. She’d made all kinds of plans for going to high school in Fairbanks. If she failed I didn’t know what it would do to her.

When she was finished she came in and handed the test to me, then went outside while I looked it over. I couldn’t grade it for her. That would have to be done in Juneau, which meant waiting six weeks before the official word came back, but I could tell her whether she’d passed or not. She passed, all right, and when I let out a yell for her to come on back in and hear the good news the class let out a cheer.

Before the pageant started we had an exhibit of all the best work the class had done over the school year. Compositions, drawings, book reports, graphs and booklets decorated the walls. Set out on the shelves were fossils and birds’ nests, pot holders and samplers, papier mâché masks and everything else the class had made and collected. A couple of Rebekah’s papers were on the wall too. She’d already mastered a first-grade
reader and her penmanship was so beautiful I’d put up some samples of it.

Seeing it there and watching the kids showing it all off to the parents, I felt proud. Without any fancy equipment, without even all the books they should have had, they’d worked hard and sopped up everything I could teach them. They’d helped each other, taught each other at times, competed and cooperated. And they’d learned. It was a grand day for everyone, including me. The pageant was all about the Gold Rush days and it went off without a hitch. The old-timers enjoyed it more than anybody. After that we served ice cream and cake, and when it was all over everybody helped clean up for the dance we were going to have that night. Maggie Carew was the last to leave.

“Well, that’s the end of ’er,” she said, looking around the room. “‘No more pencils, no more books,’ like the kids say. She’s gone now.”

She meant the school. There just wasn’t enough enrollment to keep it open. There’d never be another school here again.

“What’ll happen to it?” I asked Maggie.

“Angela’s claimin’ it,” she said. “Gonna turn it into a roadhouse after I’m gone. You did a good job.”

“Thanks.” Coining from her it was a high compliment.

“Only thing I don’t understand is how come you didn’t give the kids marks.”

“I didn’t see any reason to. They all knew how well they did.”

“How’d they know?”

“They just did. I told them where they did well and where they needed improvement, but they already knew.”

“Suppose you did give’m marks—what would mine’ve got?”

“Offhand I couldn’t say.”

“Suppose you
hadda
mark ’em?” she insisted.

“Well … I’d say maybe an A for Jimmy, B for Willard.”

“How about the others?”

“Maybe an A for Elvira, C for her two sisters, A for Lily, B for—”

“How come you give Lily an A and my Willard a B?”

“Lily’s a very bright little girl.”

“That don’t mean she’s smarter’n my Willard. No half-breed’s smarter’n a white,” she said without thinking. I didn’t answer her and she colored. “See y’at the dance,” she said as she went out.

It was still light out about 8:30 when everybody started showing up. It would stay light until about eleven when dusk would set in for a couple of hours until the sun came up again in the middle of the night. I still wasn’t used to it, going to bed in almost broad daylight and then trying to sleep with the sun nudging at me at two o’clock in the morning. It gave me a kind of a guilty feeling, as if I ought to be awake and doing things. Sometimes I’d only be able to sleep for a few hours and so I’d just get up and start the day at three in the morning, then take a nap later. It was kind of fun in a way because it was the thing you’d always wanted when you were a kid—never to have it get dark. But it was unsettling too, like living in an Alicein-Wonderland world.

Everybody kept crazy hours. Miners would be out working their claims right through the night, setting up sluice boxes, digging ditches or excavating ground. They only had three good months to get their work done and they didn’t want to waste any time. A few of them didn’t even bother with dress-up clothes when they came to that last dance. Sprouting beards for protection against mosquitoes, they showed up in clean workclothes, all ready to go back to their diggings when the dance was over. Fred and his mother came too, and that made the evening for me.

Everybody kept asking me if there was anything wrong with me, wanting to know if I was having a good time. I was, but I couldn’t help feeling sad. In a few days I’d be leaving, yet when I looked around the room it seemed to me as if it was only yesterday that I’d arrived. In less than a year I’d lived a whole lifetime here. There were still a few papers on the walls
and one of the green shades had a message written on it, left over from the class party: “Farewell, Miss Hobbs.” Underneath it, Jimmy Carew had scrawled a P.S.: “See you in Eagle.”

With Fred playing the banjo during most of the square dances, I only got to dance with him once. If it was up to me we wouldn’t have left each other’s side. On this night of all nights especially I wanted to be with him as much as possible. Even after Uncle Arthur wound up his gramophone and the round dancing started we didn’t get to dance together that much. Since I was going away, Uncle Arthur and Joe and some of the other men insisted I had to dance with them at least once. I didn’t mind it early on, but as it started to get late and there was more and more chance that Uncle Arthur would play
Home Sweet Home,
I began to get nervous.

I’d just danced with Jake Harrington when Fred ambled over to me. He looked grand. He had on a starched blue and white striped shirt, and the sun had tanned him really dark. He had a big smile on his face.

“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” I told him.

“Funny you should say that. I was just licking my chops.”

“Over what?”

“Over the supper you and I are going to have.”