“Yeah,” I add, “Dad and I need as many rocks as you can find for the canoe.”
Even though Mr. W—Dad—and I spend the rest of the day grubbing stumps and skinning a particularly smelly raccoon, he grins the whole time, big and silly and perfectly happy.
So do I.
Because if I have a dad instead of an Uncle Charlie, instead of a Mr. W, my ramshackle family just got a little more sturdy.
21
THE CANOE IS FINALLY FINISHED! Lawrence kept finding problems with the keel or uneven places in the thickness that would make it wobble and maybe flip over. The cedar cross braces we chose were the wrong length, and we weren’t seasoning the wood properly. Finally, though, he runs his hands over bow and stern and sides and nods in his polite, easygoing way.
“Kloshe kopa nika,” Lawrence says, which Dad tells me is high praise indeed.
The canoe is a lovely, shiny red-brown, and about a finger-length in thickness, which feels like a lot of wood to have under you and at the same time not enough.
My canoe. The canoe I built, me and my sturdy constitution and Lawrence and my dad.
We portage it from the clearing down the lake path. The day is bright and sunny, almost Mediterranean, and the lake ripples out crisp and blue and perfect. The water level’s down far enough to expose the stump dock, so Dad and I carry the canoe right out to the end of it and lower it into the water.
Before he’ll even hand me a paddle, Dad insists I learn to right myself. That means getting back in my canoe if it tips over.
It’s exactly as terrifying and impossible as it sounds, but I spend the rest of the afternoon tumbling out of that dratted canoe next to the dock, where Dad can fish me out before I drown. By sundown I can hit the water, thrash a few times, clumsily put my canoe on its keel, and crawl back in. Dad makes me do it twice in a row before pronouncing me seaworthy.
Even though I’m soaking wet and swaying on my feet, he gives me an awkward hug across the shoulders.
Even though I’m soaking wet and swaying on my feet, I hug him back.
The next day Dad and I go down the lake trail and find the stump dock just peeking above the waterline. My small canoe is tied up peaceably next to Dad’s big one. A little boat family. Today I’m finally going to get on the water.
“A canoe’s not exactly complicated.” Dad grunts as he kneels and gentles the stern against the dock. “You’ve just got to keep your weight centered and not make any sudden movements. Hop in.”
I don’t exactly hop, but I do scrabble and scrape my way in and kneel just before the aft cross brace, where Lawrence showed me to. The canoe shifts under me, but Dad is holding it steady.
It’s nice, once you get used to the strangeness. Like most things, I reckon, if you consider how strange doesn’t necessarily mean bad.
I squint up at him, one hand to my eyes. “Aren’t you getting in?”
Dad shakes his head. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? You going places on your own?”
“Wait. No. I can’t . . . I don’t know anything about canoes!”
“Weren’t you left to take care of Jer single-handed when he was just a few weeks old and you were only nine?”
“Well . . . yes. Because I had to. Mrs. D—”
“Did you know anything about babies? How to change them or when to feed them or how to hold them? Did you know how to manage a fire? Or everything it took to keep house?”
I didn’t. I hadn’t.
This is how you learn.
Right now Evie is playing dolls in her perfect room. Madge and Inez are in their cousins’ woods fort. Nell is wandering the Blaine orchard with some new young man. Or mending nets with the Carrs, who love her.
They’re all just across the lake. Not a one of them cares what my hands look like.
Dad hands me an oar. “Use the handle end to push off the dock. Otherwise you’ll blunt the tip. Make sure you pull on both sides or you’ll go in circles.”
“Pull?”
“You don’t paddle a canoe. You pull it.”
I wobble at first. Considerably. Then I work out how to hold my body still and use only my arms. I pull past the dock and up the bank, then back. The green-black water slides past and drips from my oar and catches the sun like a sheet of diamonds.
The lake is simply glorious.
“You think you’ve got it?” Dad calls as I’m pulling past the dock a fourth time.
“I think so!”
“Good,” he shouts. “Then head over to Seattle and pick up some flour and oatmeal. Mr. Pinkham will give you credit.”
I freeze, my oar dripping into the lake. “What—now?”
“No time like the present.”
“What if I get lost? What if I fall in? What if—”
“I doubt you’ll get lost,” Dad cuts in. “The Sawgrass camp landing is hard to miss if you paddle west and aim straight. Coming home—you’ve got a point there. I’ll tie some red cloth to this tree so you’ll recognize our dock. If you capsize, don’t panic. Right your canoe and climb back in and bail the water out. Like you did all day yesterday.”
I rest my oar across the canoe and glide. Hardly anyone lives on the Eastside. Neither white people nor Indians. I could pull around forever.
Then Dad calls, “I’ll tell Mrs. Wright you won’t be back in time to help with the washing.”
I can hear the wink in his voice even this far out. I raise my oar to say thank you, then turn my bow and start pulling.
I steer toward a stretch of gravel that I’m fairly sure is the camp landing, and as I get nearer, I recognize one old tree with its tangle of roots in the air. I splash into the shallows and drag my canoe up past the waterline like I’ve seen Dad do.
At the top of the trail I look down over the landing and across the lake. The green of the trees and the blue of the sky and the gray-dark of the water and the brown of the pale, stripped-down trunks that wash up along the shore—they’re pretty in a way I never thought to look for. Everything smells crisp and clean, and the wind hushes and rushes like a lullaby.
I compose a reflection in my head: Timber is not as irritating as it first appears.
The sun is high, but not overhead. There’s time to have tea with Nell and maybe sneak in a hand of whist if Ida and Julia aren’t busy. There’s also time to send the dolls on that sea voyage or even play sea voyage ourselves in the woods fort, before I’ll need to get the dry goods and head home.
Except Mrs. Carr says Nell has a social engagement and there’s no telling when she’ll be back.
There’s no answer at Evie’s house. Jenny’s mother says she’s gone to school, but that can’t be right, and I don’t want to call Mrs. McConaha a liar. Madge and Inez live a ways outside town, and I don’t want to spend my precious day in Seattle walking when I can’t be sure they’ll be home either.
There are new hats in the millinery’s window, new copies of the Puget Sound Weekly, and gleaming new stoves in Mr. Plummer’s store, but no sign of my friends anywhere.
I end up in front of Pinkham’s General Store, so I might as well get the dry goods. Mr. Pinkham is out for the day. His shop boy is manning the counter, and he’s reluctant to give me goods on credit even though he knows I’m friends with Ida and also that Mr. Pinkham wants to be more than friends with Ida.
“All right,” the shop boy finally says, “but you tell Mr. Wright he’ll need to pay part of this reckoning next time he’s in.”
The shop boy weighs out some flour and oatmeal, and of course I didn’t bring any bags or baskets with me. He gives me an extra flour sack, but it’s another penny. I stand there in my dress with the big mended tear up the haunch that’s also too small for me, except I didn’t notice it was too small till today because I hardly wear it anymore, and all at once I know why Dad didn’t want to come.
He knew he’d have to pay the bill, so he sent me because Ida is my friend.
“Thank you, sir,” I mumble as I take the dry goods. I’m not embarrass
ed by needing credit. Heaven knows we wouldn’t have eaten in Lowell without it. But Dad could at least have warned me.
I go past the Carr house again and spot Nell out back pegging laundry to the line. When she sees me, she drops a petticoat and rushes toward me.
“Jane! My dearest one!” Nell takes my hands in hers, then holds me at arm’s length. “Heavens, that dress! If that’s what a girl is reduced to when she’s homesteading, the West will wither right on the vine.”
Then she slaps her hands over her mouth. “Oh glory! How terribly rude of me. I do beg your pardon. You must feel bad enough about it already.”
I look down at myself. My feet are bare, and I can walk over pine needles without even flinching. There are faint bloodstains on my hem from that first day on the long bank when I made hash of that poor muskrat. My hands are covered in healed-over calluses and filled with little cuts where I took out cedar splinters with Dad’s jackknife.
I couldn’t do any of that in the lavender muslin rig Nell’s got on.
“I don’t feel bad about it at all,” I tell her, and I mean it.
Nell pats my arm. “Of course, dear heart. Of course you don’t, but surely you’ll let me lend you a dress to wear to Ida’s wedding.”
“Ida’s getting married?”
“How can you be surprised?” Nell giggles. “Albert Pinkham’s been sweet on her since she landed.”
I’m not surprised. Not really. Mostly, I hope Mr. Mercer was the first one they told, because it would serve him right to know Ida decided to marry someone who didn’t pay him one thin dime.
“It’s going to be lovely.” Nell reaches into the basket for another peg. “There’ll be flowers and cake and they’re getting Mr. Johnson to play the melodeon. The wedding’s a week from tomorrow. You have to come!”
“I’ll ask my dad,” I reply, because I already know what Mrs. D will say. “I’ll do my best.”
“The kids at her school are planning some sort of trick,” Nell goes on. “Even though it’s only been a few weeks, they—”
“Wait, what?” I cut in. “What school?”
Nell busies herself pegging a stocking and not looking at me.
That must be where Madge and Inez and Evie are right now. Where Jenny is right now, just like her mother told me. They’re in school and I’m missing it.
“Ida’s been holding a school,” Nell finally replies in the same reluctant way Elizabeth told me about Violet’s birthday party a week after it happened.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I ask. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Nell smiles in a belly-pain way. “Ida didn’t want a scene. I didn’t want you to feel left out on top of being hauled out to the middle of nowhere with no one for company but the harpy.”
“A scene?” I repeat, but I know exactly what she means. There would have been a scene too, the moment Mrs. D got so much as a whisper of either cost or charity.
I’m inclined to make a scene right now. One where I screech at Nell for deciding something for me instead of helping me.
“Is anyone else going to start a school?” I ask wearily. “I won’t say you told.”
Nell squints. “Mr. Mercer was going to conduct a session up at the university, but he married Annie Stephens and they left town in a most unseemly hurry. Something about a lawsuit by some California miner. I can name at least a dozen bachelors in a day’s worth of paddling who’d like a piece of that scoundrel’s hide, so it’s probably for the best that he went. Both for him and for Annie. Could you help me hang these sheets?”
I climb over the fence and help Nell peg the sheets to the line. I never knew Annie that well. She was friendly to everyone but kept to herself, neither flirting with officers nor playing whist with us. She spent most of her time on the Continental quietly sewing on the promenade deck.
I hope at least she gets what she expects from Mr. Mercer.
The mill’s noon whistle blows, and as the workers troop toward the cookhouse, Mr. Yesler steps onto the porch with his thumbs behind his suspenders to watch them come in.
Nell whips a handkerchief repeatedly at him. “Jane! Seeing that old pinchpenny makes me think how Ida’s always on about the ruinous amount of rent he wants for the building she’s in now. Which reminds me that I heard one of the girls who came with Mr. Mercer’s first expedition is thinking about teaching classes up at the university, because she can’t afford Ida’s building. So there you are!”
Nell’s too bluff and cheerful. She didn’t intend to tell me. She has Opinions about how likely it is I’ll make it across the lake to school every day, and she knows what it is to have a less-than-reliable guardian.
She knows about my promise, though. Promises mean something to Nell Stewart.
I start pegging clothes like a whirlwind. I hang two shirts to Nell’s one and all but fly through the stockings. Then I promise to wear whatever she wants to Ida’s wedding, and I’m through the Carrs’ gate and hurrying uphill.
I thought to wait around till my friends were out of school, but I’m not in the humor for more excuses. Any one of them could have told me too. Instead, I follow Third Avenue till it becomes something of a bumpy wagon track that winds up and up toward the university.
Up on a knoll the main building stands white and beautiful with its fancy columns and bell tower. It looks out of place, like it blew in from the capital, and the picket fence around it is meant to trap it here.
A building this grand—and probably this expensive—should be bustling. Instead, it’s silent.
A young lady is sitting on the porch, reading a book. A young lady with piled hair and a sweeping gray dress who looks like she could step into a game of whist with my Continental friends.
“Good afternoon!” I’m way too loud for this quiet place, especially in front of someone trying to read, but I plunge on, “Say, this is the university, right?”
The girl slides her finger into her book and peers up at me. “Yes. For all the good it’s doing anyone.” She talks a shade too loud and directs most of her statement at the building over her shoulder instead of at me.
“Go home, Miss Baker,” a man’s voice calls from somewhere inside. He sounds annoyed and weary, like he’s been at something unpleasant all day.
She snickers and settles herself against the porch beam. She clearly doesn’t intend to do as she’s told.
“I’m Jane.” I edge toward her hopefully. “Is it true you’re opening a school?”
“Nettie.” She smiles and holds out a hand, which I shake in what I hope is a grown-up way. “I was told I could teach school, but when I got here, there weren’t any.”
I snort softly. It’s cold comfort to know Mr. Mercer strung along that first boatload of girls too.
But Nettie goes on, “So, I decided to make one happen. The legislature will give in. They’ll allot us some money and we’ll build a school.”
I decided to make one happen. Like Miss Gower and the lifeboat school.
“Why would Seattle build a university before they built a primary school? Or even a grammar school?”
Nettie chuckles. “That, m’dear, is a very long story. Let’s just say the legislature dared us to, so we did. We do a lot of things well here. Civic planning isn’t one of them.”
“It’s so pretty. Where are all the students?”
“Huh!” Nettie snorts. “There haven’t been proper university students here in almost three years. I’d like to use one of the rooms to open a primary school, but the esteemed president does not see fit to entertain my request.”
She makes a show of putting one hand to her ear and pointing it behind her, but there’s no response from inside.
“I’ll wear the old goat down and prevail in the end.” Nettie winks. “If you’re interested, I’m charging three dollars for the session.”
It might as well be three hundred dollars. As far as I know, we still owe Mr. Mercer for our boarding bill on the Continental.
She said prevail, thoug
h. Nettie is trying to tell me something. Like Miss Gower and her big words.
“I could be your invigilator!” I straighten and grin big. “That would surely pay the cost. Right?”
Nettie frowns. “What’s an invigilator?”
“For the little ones. A helper. Um. Someone to help . . . teach . . .” I trail off because Nettie is shaking her head.
“Not to hurt your feelings, but I can’t imagine needing someone else to manage a schoolhouse in a town this size. Heavens, I wouldn’t be much of a teacher if I did!”
She says the last part cheerfully, like she doesn’t mean anything by it.
“Oh,” I say quietly. “Oh.”
I wouldn’t think an experienced teacher like Miss Gower would need a helper for just ten children.
“You’re more than welcome to join the class,” Nettie adds.
“No I’m not,” I mutter, and I slump as I turn on my heel and blindly rush down Third Avenue.
22
I PUSH OFF IN MY canoe.
I wouldn’t think an experienced teacher like Miss Gower would need a helper for just ten children. Because she didn’t. Flora saw it right away. Miss Gower never needed my help.
Half the time I wasn’t even helping. I was doing recitations and longhand division right alongside the boys.
I swing the oar from port to starboard and back, keeping a nice, steady course toward the Eastside. Stroke on stroke, just as good as chopping wood for getting angry thoughts out of my head.
She just felt sorry for me. Poor dear.
Your daughter is an excellent invigilator.
Still, Miss Gower called things as they were. If invigilate comes from Latin and means to watch, maybe that can mean a lot of things. Perhaps it’s exactly what I did back on the Continental. Perhaps it’s what I should do now.
I watched Miss Gower trick Mrs. D. Or maybe trick isn’t the right word. It’s not like I didn’t earn that money. It was more like Miss Gower showed me a way to solve the problem that let all of us win. Mrs. D got something she wanted. I got something I wanted. Miss Gower got something too—she got to infuriate someone who insisted on preserving ignorance.
The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming Page 15