Lady Professor

by Switzer, Robert L. ;

  Next spring, however, Emma would be forced to emerge, an uncertain butterfly, from this cocoon of success and approval; she would graduate from grade school and leave Miss Connor and Hamilton Grove School forever. She hoped to go on to the nearest “high” school in Stanton Mills, twelve miles away, but Emma knew little of high schools. Her two brothers and her sister had completed their education at eighth grade; she knew that it would be a struggle to persuade her parents to allow her to continue her education. It was an enticing, if slightly frightening prospect; she was prepared to fight for it.

  EMMA STAMPED THE snow off of her rubber boots and removed them on the back porch before entering the house. Tracking wet boots into the kitchen would earn a scolding. Inside the kitchen she hung her coat and knit cap on a nail. Adjacent nails where her father’s, Bjorn’s, and Henrik’s coats normally hung were bare; they must still be out working. She stood by the great iron kitchen range and rubbed her cold hands together close to its hot surface; this was the warmest place in the house and welcome after the long walk home in blowing and drifting snow.

  “Emma, don’t dawdle,” her mother called out from the front room where Emma guessed she was nursing baby Aaron. “Fetch the potatoes from the cellar and get them peeled and on to boil. Bring up a jar of string beans too. Papa and the boys came in early from cutting wood because of the snow. They’re milkin’ now and they’re going to be hungry.”

  This was good news. If her father and brothers had been still working in the woods, Emma would have been sent to the cold barn to milk their five cows by hand. She and her mother had done it together until this summer when the baby was born after a very long labor. Aaron had been born “arse first”; Emma still cringed at the memory of her mother’s cries and moans. Now her mother was burdened with the care of an infant and ill-defined—to Emma anyway—“female troubles,” so many of her farm and household chores fell to Emma. She retrieved a dozen musty potatoes from the root cellar and sat at the kitchen table to peel them with her Latin text propped in front of her; she could memorize vocabulary words while she peeled the potatoes, saving the peels to feed to the chickens.

  “You’d get that done faster if you’d get your nose out of that book,” her mother scolded as she entered the kitchen. “Honest to God, child. Kirsten would have had them boiling by now.”

  “Yes, Mama.” Emma closed the offending book and worked in silence while her mother shoveled more coal into the kitchen range and filled a frying pan with pink sausages.

  Kirsten does everything right, everything better than me, she reflected. But she’s not here, is she? Kirsten, seventeen years old, had been hired out as a live-in servant girl with the Reinhardt family, who were Catholics and had a large number—a “litter” her mother derisively called it—of young children. “God knows, we need her back since the baby was born, but we need the money too.”

  It was far from the first time Emma had heard that remark. Kirsten only returned to the family home on alternate weekends, and with the snow filling the rural roads as it was tonight, it was unlikely that her brothers would take a team and sled to bring her home this weekend. That was all right with Emma. She would have the bedroom they shared to herself. Cold as it was, she could wrap herself in quilts and read as late in the night as she wished. Miss Connor had given her Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Emma read with fascination at the guilt and shame visited on poor Tess through no fault of her own—Tess, a milkmaid like herself.

  “Now set the table, Emma. Honestly, child, do I have to tell everything? Get your head out of the clouds.”

  STAMPING OF BOOTS announced the arrival of Emma’s father and brothers on the back porch, and a gust of cold air blew into the kitchen with them. As they hung their coats and caps on nails behind the kitchen range and laid their gloves to dry on the floor next to it, a familiar odor filled the room, an amalgam of the rich organic smell of cow manure and horse urine, of spicy hay and sour milk—the smell of the cow barn. To it was added the nip of male sweat; the family had its last weekly baths five days ago.

  “Snowin’ like hell out there,” Bjorn offered. “They ain’t goin’ to be no school tomorrow, I don’t think. The teacher can’t get there if it keeps up like this.” Like his father and younger brother Henrik, Bjorn was tall and fair, already muscular from years of fieldwork and cutting and splitting wood. He patted Emma’s head. “You’ll be sorry about that, huh, Miss Bookworm?” She did not reply. Bjorn, six years older than she, seemed almost like another parent; she was more fond of gentle Henrik, who was only two years older and never teased her about her bookish ways and still played with her in their rare free time.

  “Wash up now,” her mother said. “Supper’s ready.”

  After a perfunctory recitation of the usual prayer, the family ate hungrily. There was little conversation beyond requests to pass dishes until the meal was finished, when Emma’s father scraped back his chair and began speaking almost as though he were thinking aloud. “That snow is gonna slow us down if it gets too deep. We need to get them big oaks snaked out of the woods and cut for the framing of the barn addition. And the boys have got a couple wagon loads of fence posts cut that we need to sell.”

  Emma’s mother’s mouth tightened. The barn addition was a source of contention between her parents. Her father had come home a few months ago and announced, “I’ve been talking to that Swiss cheesemaker, Tschudi. He says he’ll buy all the milk we can bring him, a dollar a hundredweight. I figure if we put an addition on the barn, we can milk more cows, store the milk in cans in the cow tank overnight so it won’t go sour and haul it to his factory every day. Be good steady income.”

  “How many cows?” her mother had asked warily.

  “Oh, ten, twelve; maybe work up to more later.”

  “Who’s gonna milk all them cows? Not Emma and me, like we do now. Not that many. And with the baby and all.”

  “Oh, me and the boys will pitch in.”

  “What about the hogs? We’re feedin’ them the skim milk now.”

  “There’s a lot of whey from cheesemakin’. Tschudi needs to get rid of it anyways. So we can haul it back for the hogs. It’s good for ’em. Along with corn like we do now.”

  “And how’re we going to pay for the cows? That’s a lot of money.”

  “We’ll have to borrow enough from the bank to buy half a dozen or so. Pay it back from the milk money. Then, if we keep all the heifer calves, we can grow our own herd in two, three years.”

  Her father’s expression made it clear that the decision was made and no further discussion was welcome.

  “Well, just don’t come to me when it’s hayin’ time, or threshin’, or plantin’ time and you can’t keep up with milkin’ all them cows,” her mother muttered.

  Emma knew that a good portion of the extra chore would fall to her, and she dreaded it. Already her hands ached after milking five cows. A dozen more? It was too much. Secretly she had begun plotting her eventual escape from the drudgery of the farm: she would become a schoolteacher like Miss Connor. Already she was teaching the little ones, and Miss Connor called her “my bright young assistant.”

  WINTER EVENTUALLY GAVE way to springtime, Emma’s favorite time on the farm. A canopy of white and pink blossoms covered the orchard’s apple, plum, and pear trees. Fresh grass and swaths of yellow dandelions, tender leaves on the trees replaced the melting snow banks and mud of early spring. There were fields to be plowed and planted, but today, in respect of the Sabbath, no fieldwork would be done.

  Henrik and Emma were free to pursue a favorite shared pastime. Henrik had helped Emma with her collection of wild bird eggs from the beginning two years ago. Finding the eggs of meadow and ground birds—meadowlarks, bobolinks, red-winged blackbirds, pheasants—had been relatively easy. Henrik often spotted their nests during his work in the fields and alerted Emma.

  Raiding the nests of birds that nested around the buildings and in nearby trees—pigeons, sparrows, starlings, grackles, robins, barn swallows
—also presented little challenge, as Henrik was willing to climb the trees.

  Emma punctured each end of the eggs with a needle and blew the contents out. She had learned to candle the farm’s hens’ eggs before they were sold, so she could tell whether a wild bird’s egg contained an embryo that was too large to be expelled. Those eggs were returned to their nests, although Emma had broken a few and studied the stages in their development from bloody spot to tiny bird with huge closed eyes, naked pink body and a rubbery yellow beak. The empty eggshells were preserved with a drop of camphor and placed in cotton-lined boxes with neat handwritten labels identifying the species. Emma also kept written notes about the location and construction of the nests, undisturbed if possible, but retrieved from trees by Henrik if necessary.

  Now it had become more difficult to add new specimens to the collection. Emma and Henrik hunted for birds whose nests were harder to find or raid, such as woodpeckers, owls, and secretive woodland birds. Henrik had spotted a crow’s nest at the top of a dead hackberry tree hidden in the farm’s woods. He planned to climb it and retrieve the eggs for Emma’s collection. If he succeeded, it would be a triumph. Crows were the most intelligent of birds; their nests were difficult to locate and perched precariously in high, inaccessible places.

  As they headed for the crow’s nest, they crossed a stony outcropping in the hilly pasture that lay between the farm’s gently rolling cultivated fields and the twenty-acre woods at the northern edge of the farm. A killdeer fluttered on the ground a few feet from them uttering its shrill “Kill-DEER!” cry and dragging a bent wing behind so that reddish under feathers were displayed.

  “Look, she’s pretending to be hurt, so we will try to catch her and not find her nest,” Emma said. “Most birds just fly away or scream at you. Isn’t she clever?”

  “You’ve already got killdeer eggs, haven’t you? Do you want to look for her nest?”

  “No, let her go.”

  As they approached the dead hackberry tree, Emma felt a shiver of fear. “Henrik, it’s taller than our windmill, and the nest is way up at the top. Be careful.”

  A large saucer-shaped mass of sticks lay wedged in a crotch formed by three small branches some forty-to-fifty feet above them. Two black crows circled warily.

  “It’s OK, Emmie, I’ll just shinny up there and lower ’em in the sack the way we said,” Henrik replied.

  The plan was to place two or three purloined eggs in a cloth sack and lower it gently to the ground with a length of binder twine so that his hands would be free for the difficult descent. With that, Henrik was up the tree, searching out branches to brace his feet and pull himself up. He moved quickly but carefully. A few dead branches were too brittle to support his weight and broke off and clattered to the ground.

  Emma watched nervously.

  As Henrik approached the nest, the crows cried out loudly and flew at him. He ignored them and let out a whoop when he secured a position at the top of the tree from which he could reach into the nest. “Eggs! A whole clutch of ’em!” He wobbled as he wrenched the sack from his back pocket.

  “Hang on, Henrik!” Emma cried out. “You almost fell!”

  “Don’t worry,” came his cheerful voice from above. “I’ve got three of ’em in the sack. Let me get fixed tight here and I’ll lower ’em down.” The sack slowly descended, swaying and bumping branches gently.

  Emma reached up eagerly and pulled the sack into her hands. “Let go the string,” she called. “I’ve got it.”

  Inside the sack were three pale blue-green eggs covered with dark brown speckles, larger than most of the eggs in Emma’s collection, but smaller than the hen’s eggs she gathered daily from the henhouse.

  “Do they have babies in ‘em?” Henrik called down.

  Emma held an egg toward the sun and squinted, twirled the egg gently. “No! They’re perfect. Just yolks. Now come down. You’re scarin’ me up there.”

  Henrik crept down the tree more slowly than he had ascended it. He felt for supporting branches with his feet.

  Emma watched his fumbling moves nervously, called out when she could warn that he was missing a branch or tell him where one was near his foot. She relaxed and returned to studying the eggs when he was about ten feet above the ground. She heard a sharp snap and little cry. She jerked her head around and witnessed Henrik landing on his side at the base of the tree.

  “Henrik!” she screamed.

  He lay still for a long time, then rolled over onto his back and groaned.

  Emma knelt by him, her hands fluttering, not knowing if or where she should touch him, finally caressing his face. “Are you all right? Please, be all right.”

  “I guess so,” he mumbled. “Knocked the wind out of me.” He sat up, then fell back with a cry. “Oh, my leg hurts like hell.”

  “Do you think it’s broke?”

  “I dunno. Have to see if I can stand. Gimme a few minutes.”

  Emma began to cry. “I’m sorry, Henny. It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have talked you into climbing that tree. Just to get some old crow’s eggs.”

  “It’s OK, Emmie. Don’t cry. Looks like I ripped up this leg of my overalls. Mama’s gonna be mad.” Henrik pulled the torn cloth aside to reveal bloody abrasions along his right leg. “Ripped my leg up a little too.”

  “Does it hurt? Can you walk? We got to get you back to the house and cleaned up.”

  Henrik struggled to his feet and then cried out. “Oh, shit!”

  “Is it broke?”

  “I don’t think so, but it sure hurts when I stand on it.”

  They made their way from the woods back to the farmstead. Henrik leaned on Emma and limped painfully. How strange it was to support her big, strong blond brother, fully a head taller, the brother on whom she had leaned—figuratively at least—for years. She was filled with tenderness.

  “What happened? How’d you hurt yourself?” their mother demanded when they crept into the farm house.

  Henrik hung his head and remained silent, but Emma spoke up.

  “He fell out of a tree. We think it’s just a sprain or a bruise. It isn’t broken.”

  “What the Sam Hill was he doing up a tree?” Papa asked.

  “He was fetching some crow’s eggs for my collection. It’s my fault. I put him up to it.”

  “That’s just enough of this foolishness,” her mother cried. “I want you to get rid of them damned eggs. Throw ’em out and stay out of trees.”

  “Mama, no!”

  “Yes. Now. A girl has no business fooling around with such things in the first place.”

  “Mama, please let her keep the eggs,” Henrik pleaded. “I’ll promise not to climb no more trees.”

  Their mother shook her head. Emma and Henrik turned their eyes to their father in appeal. His word would be final.

  He ran his fingers through his graying hair, avoided his wife’s glare. “Well, all right. She can keep ’em so long’s you both promise not to climb no more trees.”

  “We promise,” they chorused, but Henrik winked at Emma.

  She led him to the kitchen and dabbed the wounds to his leg with a clean rag and warm water from the teakettle on the stove. He tried not to wince as she painted the abrasions with tincture of iodine.

  “Don’t forget to blow out them crow’s eggs,” he whispered. “They’re beauties.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER on a Friday afternoon after all the other pupils were dismissed and ran shouting out of the schoolhouse, Emma was surprised when Miss Conner asked her to remain behind.

  “You can clean the blackboards and help me tidy up. Then I’ll take you home with me. I need to talk to your parents.” What on earth was this about? Surely she was not in trouble. Miss Conner used a horse and buggy to travel between Stanton Mills and Hamilton Grove School when the roads were passable. The horse was kept in a little barn next to the boys’ outhouse. Emma helped Miss Connor hitch up the horse and the two set off for the Hansen farm.

  “For Heaven’s sakes, it�
�s the school teacher, Miss Connor,” Emma‘s mother exclaimed when she saw her and Emma dismount the buggy. “What on earth does she want? Does you suppose Emma’s sick?”

  She pulled off her apron and moved quickly from the house to greet Miss Connor. Emma trailed behind her teacher.

  “Miss Connor. This is a surprise. Can you stay for dinner?”

  “Oh, no, thank you. I can’t stay. I wonder if I might have a word with you and Mr. Hansen about Emma.”

  “What’s she done?”

  Miss Connor laughed. “Oh, it’s nothing like that. You can be very proud of Emma. I want to talk about her going to high school next year.”

  Papa Hansen was summoned from the barn, and Emma’s parents sat down at the kitchen table opposite Miss Connor. Emma looked inquiringly at her parents, then Miss Connor.

  “Emma, stay here. This concerns you,” Miss Connor said. “Mr. and Mrs. Hansen, as you know, Emma will be going to high school in Stanton Mills this fall.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Papa muttered. “None of the other ones went to high school.”

  “Oh, but, Mr. Hansen, there’s a new law now. Graduation for eighth grade is no longer the end of required education in Illinois. She has to go to school until she’s sixteen, and she’s only just turned thirteen. Besides, she really must go. Emma is without question the brightest pupil I have taught in fifteen years.”

  “Well, I don’t see how it’s gonna work,” Papa replied. “Stanton Mills is twelve miles from here. I can’t let her have a horse and wagon all day every day. Besides, in winter sometimes you can’t hardly get through them roads for the snow. And springtime they’re nothin’ but mud. We can’t send a little snip of a girl out into that.”

  “I agree,” Miss Connor replied calmly. “I’ve been thinking about that, and I believe I have come up with a solution. Emma can board in town.”

  “Board in town,” Mama cried. “We can’t afford that.”

  “I’ve talked to the Oosterfelds, the folks who operate the grocery store on Center Street in Stanton Mills. They would be willing to provide room and board for Emma in exchange for her working in the store in evenings and weekends. They have no children and they could use the help. I’ve known them for years. They’re good Christian folks. I’m sure they’d be good to Emma. And Emma would do a good job for them.”