The Year of Miss Agnes

by Kirkpatrick Hill

  Toby Joe and Plasker went out with Toby Joe’s little dog team to cut down a tree as soon as it got light, and they found a really good one. But it was too cold that day, fifty below zero, and all the needles just fell off on the way home. Too brittle. It was just a little skeleton they brought back that day. We all had to laugh.

  Next day Toby Joe and Plasker got another one, and they got it right near the school and carried it easy like to the school so it wouldn’t fall apart. So that was okay.

  After we thawed it out, we put popcorn strings on it and little chains made of green and red paper. That tree looked just beautiful.

  It was supposed to have candles on it, but Miss Agnes said that spruce was too dry, the needles just falling off with a little sprinkling sound when you walked by it. We might set it on fire if we put candles on it.

  Miss Agnes showed us some Christmas pictures from other countries, and those Christmas trees were just fat. Different from our skinny little trees. Our little, skinny tree branches couldn’t even hold a candle, I don’t think.

  Miss Agnes taught us a whole bunch of Christmas songs. Some we knew from the radio already. And we put on a play.

  Everyone came back from the trapline at Christmas, before they went out beaver trapping, so all the kids got to be in the play.

  Some people went to Allakaket for Christmas, so they could go to the church there. But the rest of the people came to hear us sing and put on our play.

  We did that one about ghosts, where this old man is really selfish but these ghosts come to show him how bad he’s been and how everyone doesn’t like him. “A Christmas Carol,” it’s called, which is funny, because it’s not about singing.

  One of the ghosts, Plasker, had to have chains, so we put some marten traps together, and he let them just clank along. And one of the ghosts had to moan, and that was Toby Joe. He was just scary when he did that. Kenny and Roger were ghosts, too. I wanted to be a ghost, but Miss Agnes said we didn’t have enough girls to waste them being ghosts, so I had to be the nephew’s wife. That wasn’t as much fun as a ghost. Jimmy Sam was the nephew, and he had to wear this tall black hat that kept falling off.

  Charlie-Boy was Tiny Tim, that little crippled boy, and he had to be carried on his dad’s back, so that had to be Little Pete because he was the only one big enough to carry Charlie-Boy. Marie was Mrs. Cratchit, and she had this kind of hat that was like a lace doily on her head, and her hair up. Marie had more fun than anyone, and she wasn’t scared a bit.

  Selina and Bertha got to be the Cratchit children, saying all this stuff about the goose.

  Old Miss Toby came to watch, and my mother said the words in Indian for her so she could tell what we were saying, and boy, she really liked that play. In the Indian way the worst thing you could be is selfish, and everyone says if you do that, it will come back on you.

  So Miss Toby thought that was a good play we did.

  We made a lot of cookies and things for after the play, and Miss Agnes made a hot drink with apple juice and sugar and cinnamon in it to have with the cookies we made.

  Miss Agnes took pictures of everyone after the Christmas play. First she took us all together, and then she took a picture of everyone just alone.

  She had a camera with a bright light that flashed when she clicked the shutter. Everyone carried on and pretended that light made them blind and they couldn’t see anything.

  When we were eating the cookies and drinking the apple drink, Grandpa told us the story about when a priest came to Allakaket, when he was a little boy, and wanted to take a picture of everyone. No one had ever seen a camera before. The camera had a really bright flash, much bigger than the one on Miss Agnes’s camera. It scared all the people so bad, everyone ran out of the church screaming.

  We really laughed about that.

  A while after everyone was back from beaver trapping, Miss Agnes showed us those pictures she took. She put a white sheet up on the wall, over all our drawings and the time line. It had to be dark in the room, so we blew out all the lamps, and then she put the little, square pictures in a machine and they blew up real big. Just like being in the picture, the pictures were so big.

  We stared and stared. We never saw any pictures of ourselves before. We didn’t look like what we thought. Toby Joe said, “Jeez, I look just like my brother!” That was funny because Toby Joe always called his brother “Ugly.” Marie was happy to see herself up there. She looked beautiful, and you could tell she thought so, too.

  I didn’t even know myself in the pictures, but there was this girl wearing my sweater, so it had to be me. My hair was very messy, just like Mamma always tells me.

  And my smile didn’t look in the pictures the way it feels on my face. My smile looked like Bokko’s smile, like our daddy’s smile. I never knew that before.

  Then Miss Agnes showed pictures of the places she’d been. The best ones were the pictures of Greece, where the Greek gods come from. There were all these old, white stone places partly knocked down. Temples and stuff.

  There was England, and where she came from, the town where those people sang in the big church.

  It was flat there, no hills, and we laughed at the river, it was so little and lazy. Just a creek, really. There were lots of guys rowing this one skinny boat, all bent forward at the same time.

  There were flowers on the trees.

  “That’s how it is in springtime. Just about now,” she said.

  We were surprised, because it was still winter here. Forty below zero at night sometimes, though it got warm fast in the day because the sun was staying out a long time now. To think there were flowers somewhere right now, while we were here in the snow.

  “Those flowers smell wonderful,” she said. We could see how she could miss a place that had pink flowers on the trees. I would like to see that.

  Chapter 14

  Some of the kids could read pretty good. Toby Joe was the best of us younger ones, because he would go to Old Man Andreson’s and read all the magazines and stuff. And Jimmy Sam could read as good as Miss Agnes, really.

  But Marie could hardly read at all, and none of us younger ones were much good at it. We read real slow, and the big words gave us fits. Selina and Charlie-Boy were still learning the alphabet.

  Miss Agnes gave Jimmy and Toby Joe regular books to read, like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. They just had to practice to get faster, she said.

  For the rest of us Miss Agnes did something different.

  We had these little books all the other teachers used, with Dick, Jane, and Sally in them. They had a mother and a father, and that’s what they called them, Mother and Father. We never heard that before.

  And there was a kitten named Puff and a dog named Spot. A little brown-and-white dog, low to the ground, with floppy ears.

  They lived in a town with lots of trees along a cement road, and the houses were really big. All they did was play, those kids. The boy had short pants on, and the girl had yellow hair. And a ribbon in the hair. I think those kids were flesh colored, like the crayon.

  When you read those books, it was kind of embarrassing. “Look, look, look. See Spot run.” They talked kind of stupid like that.

  So Miss Agnes didn’t want us to read those books, but Marie, she liked them. She liked to look at the pictures, and Bertha and me did, too.

  I liked to think about living in a place like that, where everything was so clean and fancy. And they had a bedroom all for themselves, those kids.

  I would like to have a mother like that, too, always smiling and making something good to eat. Milk and cookies, she always gave them. Well, I don’t like milk, but the cookies would be very nice.

  So Miss Agnes put those books away, and she made some other little books for us to read. A different one for each of us. Just little pieces of paper stapled together, but the thing about those books was they were about us. My book said this: “There once was a little girl named Fred. Her real name was Frederika, and she lived on the Koyukuk Rive
r with her mother, Anna, and her sister, Bokko.” And there was more about me and Bokko playing and stuff, and our grandma, and what we did for work, like washing the dishes and bringing in the wood.

  It was so good, I read it over and over, and that’s how I learned those words.

  Then every few days Miss Agnes would write me another book with those words in them, and more, harder words.

  She wrote one for Marie about how she’d grow up and get married and have a whole bunch of kids and how she would cook, and all that. Marie loved her book. When she read it, she’d get sort of pink in her cheeks, and you could see that Miss Agnes had written for her a life she wanted to have. Even if she had to take care of her mamma’s kids so much, she wanted some of her own. She was just like that.

  Pretty soon we were reading each other’s books, and then we’d tell Miss Agnes what to put in each book for everyone. She’d write down the things we said.

  And that’s how we got along in our reading. Miss Agnes would make these little books for us, and when we knew them by heart, she’d give us new ones. It was easier learning to read that way. Seemed like none of the words never were hard that way.

  And then she’d make us write stories, because she said that writing was just reading backwards, and you learned to read by writing just as well as reading. Reading backwards. We thought that was very funny.

  Miss Agnes said not to worry about the spelling, just write. Anything we wanted to. Even we could make up stuff. It didn’t have to be true. I really liked that. To make up pretend stories.

  She gave each of us a little notebook. Any word we needed for our story she would write for us in that notebook. That was our own little dictionary. And that’s the way we learned to spell.

  Bokko would tell her story with signs to Miss Agnes, and she would write it on paper for her.

  And so we’d do that every day, and then we’d read our stories out loud to the rest of the kids. Some of them were pretty funny.

  Marie wrote one about getting her long hair caught in the wringer on the washing machine, and how her head was already pulled up to the place the clothes squeeze through before she got the washer shut off. Little Pete wrote about the time a mamma moose chased him up a tree when he was at fish camp because she thought he might hurt her baby.

  I liked to write all the stuff Grandpa told me about the old days, and once I wrote all about Old Man Andreson’s life. He had a lot of interesting things happen to him. I asked him a lot of questions and put the answers in my story, and he was just proud of that. Best of all, I liked to write about sort of magic things, like in the fairy stories. Magic snowshoes that would take you anywhere, and pills you could take to learn everything without even studying it. Stuff like that.

  Writing stories was what I was good at. Miss Agnes said everyone was good at something, and when we asked her to tell us what we were good at, that’s what she told me.

  Charlie-Boy was good at sign language, and Jimmy was good at science. Selina was good at drawing, and Roger was good at airplanes. Kenny was good at music, and Bertha was good at printing and cursive. Little Pete was good at making people feel happy, and Marie was good at running the house and dancing.

  Plasker was good at geography, Toby Joe was good at reading, and Bokko was good at sewing.

  When she got to me, she said, “Fred notices everything about everyone, what they say and do and look like. And what they’re feeling. So she’s good at writing stories.”

  We were all happy to hear what we were good at. I couldn’t wait to tell Grandpa what she said about me. I was just proud.

  Chapter 15

  We knew that we didn’t talk the right way, because the other teachers had told us we had terrible English.

  But Miss Agnes said there were lots of right ways to talk.

  What we talked in the village was right, she said. That’s the way to talk here. And when we talk in Athabascan, that’s the right way, too. But there’s another way to talk, and that’s what we want to talk when we go to the city or go away to school, and that’s what she said she was going to teach us.

  So we learned that when we’re somewhere else, we shouldn’t say ain’t, and we shouldn’t mix up our e’s and i’s, like say pin when we mean pen. That’s really hard to do.

  We shouldn’t say gots instead of has. You have to say did, like “He did it,” not “He done it.” And you can’t say “I seen a moose.” “I have seen a moose.” That’s the right way. Or “I saw a moose.”

  And then there’s the thing about nothing words. That is really hard to get straight. If you use too many words that mean nothing, then it means something. Instead of nothing. Like if you say “I don’t want nothing,” then you mean you want something, because you said nothing wasn’t what you wanted. So you say “I don’t want anything.” Whew.

  The thing about good English is that when you say it right, it sounds wrong, because we’re not used to saying it right. Miss Agnes said it takes practice.

  Jimmy Sam looked at Miss Agnes and smiled that smile of his, like when she told him about the stars and all that. He was really happy with this good English he was learning. He liked to do things right.

  After we studied English for a while, we made up this Good English game. Every time we caught somebody saying ain’t, or using too many nothing words, or anything like that, we had to say, “Gotcha!” Then we could put a check mark by their name on the board. Whoever had the littlest check marks was the winner for that day.

  I was the winner in that game lots, but it seemed like I had to think over every word I said before I said it.

  After Christmas, Little Pete and Roger and the other kids were in school for a little while before they went out beaver trapping. That’s when Miss Agnes read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to us, and Kidnapped and a book about King Arthur. She knew those big boys would like those ones. All of us did, they were so exciting.

  In February, when everyone was back from beaver trapping, Miss Agnes read the story of Hudson Stuck to us. That’s the one that was a priest. He used to travel all around here with a dog team, and he built the school at Allakaket and the mission and told all the people from all around to move there.

  That was really interesting. There were lots of people in it who we knew. The old people were right in that book, Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled. Even my grandpa. It made us feel like something, that someone had written this book about us, that we were in a book.

  But the part Miss Agnes liked was about the boy the priest took with him. He was an Indian boy who didn’t speak any English, and every night when they camped in their tent, even if it was fifty below zero, the priest would teach that boy, and after a while he was so smart he was going to go Outside to get to be a doctor. Hudson Stuck was sending him out to school to do that. To be the first Indian doctor.

  But the boy was in a boat that hit an iceberg, and he and his new wife died in that cold water. So he never became a doctor.

  Before Miss Agnes came, we didn’t know people like us could learn that much and could be a doctor. It was in my head then, that I could do something really big. I didn’t want to have babies, like Marie, and marry some boy. Maybe he’d get mean sometimes. Or have another girlfriend, like Martha’s husband. I wouldn’t like that.

  I could make my own money. Sally Oldman went to Tanana when she was sixteen, and she worked there, helping the doctors. She didn’t want no bunch of kids, either. Any.

  Chapter 16

  By spring we could all read pretty good and write stories and tell the names of the places on the whole map.

  That big map was one of our best things. Plasker liked it the best. Plasker used to like to touch the map and say the names, low, like magic words. Like he could feel something coming from the countries on that map. I could do it, too, sometimes.

  When I touched Africa, I could see that long, flat place where the elephants and the zebras were and feel the hot wind on me and smell dry grass. Now I wanted to go everywhere. And
before, I never knew there was an everywhere.

  By spring I could add and subtract. Bokko could write now, too, and read the books Miss Agnes wrote for her. If she wanted something, she could write to us now, not really good, but enough that we could tell.

  She knew a lot of signs, more than two hundred, Miss Agnes said. And so did all of us. We learned right along with Bokko.

  Only Miss Agnes had to look the signs up in the book all the time. She couldn’t remember them as good as us. Sometimes she’d just ask us what the sign was for book, or walk, or something, and we’d tell her, so she wouldn’t have to look it up. “I have an old brain,” she’d sign to Bokko. “It’s not good. A young brain is good.”

  Even sometimes Bokko would sign bad things at us now, like when she got mad at us. Being mad in sign language is funny, so we’d laugh, and then Bokko would have to laugh, too.

  The funny thing was that we didn’t just use the signs to talk to Bokko, we used them to talk to each other. Like if Little Pete said something, maybe Roger would sign to him, “You’re crazy!” or maybe when I saw Bertha in the store, I would just sign to her, “Hi!”

  Pretty soon a lot of the grown-ups were learning some signs, too. Sometimes the old men sitting around in the store with Old Man Andreson would be funny, throwing their hands around, pretending they were talking real fast in sign language, to tease us.

  When Mamma saw everyone getting interested in it, she even started to learn some signs. She would ask me how to say things like be careful and hurry up and bossy things like that, but me and Bokko didn’t care, we were just happy she was learning and not mad about it anymore. And even sometimes Mamma would forget and would sign to me just like I was deaf, too. The first time it happened we all laughed, even Mamma, it was so funny.

  By the time the snow had a hard crust from the warm days, it was time for nearly everyone to go to spring camp. Little Pete and Roger went to Long Lake. Marie and Plasker and Toby Joe went with their folks to North Fork, and Bertha went to spring camp up by Allakaket.