“I doubt I have anything you want.” Especially considering the berry pie on her stove behind me.
“Teach my brothers to read.”
“That’s worth a goat to you?” I ask.
“Most definitely.”
I squint at her, but she’s not teasing. “You went to school. Couldn’t you teach them?”
Hannah shrugs. “It was a mission school. I learned to sew and pray.”
“There’s a school in town,” I say, and it comes out sad, like I’m already out of time. “At the university. It costs money, but the teacher’s nice.”
“I doubt they’d be allowed to go.” Hannah glances uneasily at the door and talks quietly even though William and Victor are still outside with the goat.
She says doubt, but she sounds pretty sure. At that town meeting in Seattle, Reverend Bagley had nothing nice to say about Indians and white people getting married. There have to be more kids like the Norleys if he’s complaining so much. Kids whose minds get broadened only in ways that people like Reverend Bagley decide is good for them.
“Even if they were allowed,” Hannah goes on, “can you see either one of them lasting five minutes in a classroom where they’d have to sit still and pay attention and study and recite?”
Something goes kerthump against the cabin wall, then a mudball sings past the front window. Moments later William bursts through the door laughing, both arms filthy to the elbow. Victor barrels in after him with wads of mud clinging to his hair and shoulders.
“Out! Wash it off outside! And you”—Hannah stabs a finger at William—“will do the dishes tonight for that bit of meanness.”
“Awwwww, we were only playing!” William protests, but he grumbles his way to the dishpan and flicks out his jackknife to shave some soap into the water.
Hannah turns to me. “Teaching those two to read will be a piece of work, but if you’ll do it, you can take that awful goat with you this very moment. I mean, when the rain lets up.”
“Sure,” I say, mostly because I don’t like the idea of anyone having to look in a schoolhouse window and not being allowed to go inside, but also because if we have a goat, I can sell cheese and butter to Mr. Pinkham and pay Miss Baker with coins. “Only, I can’t take the goat with me this very moment, because I have no idea where home is from here. I wish I did. I’ll be missed.”
As soon as I say it, I reckon how long it’s been since school got out. Here I’ve been, eating supper without even a thought for how frantic they must be.
“Our granddad can take you home,” Hannah replies. “Victor, go see if Granddad is back yet.”
Victor gives a cheerful salute, puts on his oilskins, and disappears out the door.
Hannah and I agree that I’ll come over every Saturday to teach William and Victor. I clear the supper dishes while she fixes a heaping plate for her grandfather and sets it on the back of the stove to keep warm.
“I can teach them ciphering, too. So they can know if anyone’s trying to cheat them. Also . . .” I pause, because I’m not sure how to say it without sounding rude. “If you want to learn too, that’s fine with me.”
“I’ll think about it,” Hannah says, but she also smiles real shy like she’s glad I’m coming at all.
Victor bangs through the door, leaving it open behind him. The sky is more than passing dark now, and I’m glad I’ll have an escort home, because there’s no way I’d find my way in the dark and the rain.
An older man in oilskins comes in behind Victor, and I blurt, “Lawrence!”
His brows go up when he sees it’s me, and he says something to Hannah in Lushootseed. She nods and replies. Then Lawrence smiles and gestures at the door.
I hug Hannah and thank her for everything—supper, her old dress, the goat.
I wonder if she likes to knit.
Down at the dock Lawrence ties a long rope between our canoes. Victor and William have tethered the goat into their granddad’s weather-beaten bow. The poor thing is already dripping from her ears and tail and belly-hair.
“Mamook isick.” Lawrence makes a paddling motion with his oar.
I nod. He’s telling me that I have to pull too, that he’ll be guiding me and not dragging me. “Mahsie, Lawrence. Really.”
We pull. The rain sheets down.
It feels like forever before Lawrence starts moving toward shore. The stump dock is completely underwater, so he finds a place where I can leap from root to root and scrabble up to damp land. Then he tosses my mooring rope, and while I’m securing my canoe, he hoists the goat up on shore. Even though she’s pitiful and shivering, the rope around her neck trailing like she just escaped the hangman, I could swear she’s glaring at me.
“Kloshe chako?” Lawrence calls.
“Yes, I’m all right. Kloshe chako. Mahsie hyiu!”
He waves his oar, then points his canoe away from land. I wrap the goat’s rope double around my hand and tug her up the lake path toward home.
24
THE CABIN WINDOWS GLOW ALL the way from the head of the lake trail. It’s hard to move. The shock of leaving the Norleys’ warm kitchen and getting soaked and windblasted once more left me boneless.
I drag through the clearing, towing the goat, and push the cabin door open.
Mrs. D and Dad are sitting together on the hearth bench. He’s not whittling. She’s not knitting. They’re holding hands and staring at the fire.
Jer is belly-down on his bed, playing with Hoss and Other Hoss, but he must feel the draft, because he looks up and squeals, “Daney!”
Dad is across the room in an instant. He pulls me inside the cabin, goat and all, and throws his arms around me. He doesn’t even seem to care that I’m soaking wet and dripping all over the floor. I hug him back.
“Daney! Daney!” Jer squeezes my leg, then pulls away. “Ugh. You all wet.”
Mrs. D scrubs at her eyes as she waits for a turn to hug me, and she gives me a proper hug too, like she’d give Jer.
“Charles went over to Seattle to look for you when you didn’t come home on time,” she says. “I thought for sure you’d stayed to play with one of your friends without a thought or care for anyone who might be worried about you.”
She’s speaking to me. She’s calling Dad Charles instead of Mr. Wright.
She was worried about me.
Dad runs a hand through his damp hair. Quietly, he says, “Your canoe wasn’t at the landing.”
I know what he’s not saying in front of Jer, and I’m glad for it. I thought you capsized. I thought you drowned.
“I won’t ever stay after school without telling you,” I promise, and I mean it. “I’m sorry for worrying you. I—”
“Why in heaven’s name do you have a goat?” Mrs. D’s voice is back to its old, unsentimental grating.
“Oh.” I look down at the rope in my hand. “Oh! She’s our goat now. Milk and butter and cheese!”
I tell them how the wind pushed me and it was foggy and I lost my way and met the Norleys—did they know Lawrence is a granddad?—and agreed to teach the boys in return for a—
“Hey!” Jer yanks his nightshirt out of the goat’s mouth. “Bad goat!”
“—goat,” I finish. “We should pen her up in one of the sheds right away, because Jer’s right. She doesn’t know how to behave.”
“Bad goat,” Jer mutters, glaring at her.
Dad puts on his overcoat and takes Bad Goat outside while I peel off my wet clothes behind the curtain.
When I come out in my nightdress, Mrs. D is waiting, arms folded. “You scared the daylights out of Mr. Wright. You scared the daylights out of me. And for what?”
She knows very well what. She just can’t see why.
I’m trying to find the strength to yes no I don’t know ma’am her, when she goes on quietly, “Do you really hate me so much? Would it be so terrible if you were more like me?”
She’s not giving me a Look. Her face is open and sad. Betrayed, even.
There’s no rig
ht answer.
“Because I can’t think of another reason you’d insist on doing the things you do. There’s nothing special about book learning. There’s nothing ladylike about traps and the woodpile.” Then she adds in a soft voice, “There’s nothing wrong with keeping house.”
“I can’t be you.” I’m tired enough to be honest. “I don’t know how. I want to be me.”
Mrs. D sighs. “I don’t know what to make of you sometimes.”
No. I don’t think she would. Maybe she doesn’t want to. She likely never had a Miss Gower or a dad. No one’s ever asked what she thought. If no one helps you prevail, maybe it helps to convince yourself you’re better off than anyone who does.
“I don’t know what to make of you a lot of the time.” I say it nice but maybe that’s not enough, so I add, “Ma’am.”
Mrs. D coughs a laugh just like Nell might, and that’s when I remember she’s not much older than Nell. Or me.
“Well, we’re here now.” Mrs. D waves a hand like she’s pointing at the whole Eastside. “This place will make of us what it will.”
It won’t, though. It can’t. Washington Territory is only a place. A lovely place, sure, but it can’t change everything. That has to come from you.
Now that I’ve agreed to teach William and Victor, all I can think about is how I have no books. Not that you need them to teach someone to read, but if the Norley boys can’t have a real teacher, at the very least they should learn with proper books.
Jenny has a first reader, but her little brother needs it. Evie can’t remember what became of hers. I ask Nell, not because I think it’s likely she’d have books to lend, but because she’s got a dozen suitors, and every last one would produce ten readers if she dropped the smallest of hints.
“You should talk to Ida. She’s got a whole rucksack full of schoolbooks, and it’s unlikely she’s reading them for pleasure.” Nell picks at a knot in the fishing net she’s mending. “Plus, I might have mentioned how upset you were that she didn’t invite you to her school. So she’s likely looking for a way to make it up to you.”
I groan and shove Nell playfully, but one day after school, I go to Pinkham’s General Store. Ida is sweeping the porch, bundled in the lovely woolen cape that marks her a back Easterner from fifty yards away.
“Jane!” Ida leans the broom against the building and beckons me up the steps. “Nell told me everything. I’m sorry. I really am. But—”
“I know, but.” I pat Ida’s arm to let her know I’m not mad, and this time I really do mean it. Between my canoe and Dad, there will be fewer buts in the future.
“You really ought to start paddling in more often.” Ida says it like it’s no more odd than walking up the block and around the corner. “Nell and Sarah and I need a better fourth than Kitty McEvoy. Besides, we’ve missed you.”
“I’ll try,” I promise, although I’ll be pulling and not paddling. Schoolteachers know a lot of things, but even they can broaden their minds on occasion. “Say, is there any chance you’d lend me your books? Your readers and spellers, I mean, from when you were teaching.”
Ida scrunches her nose. “I imagine it would get tiresome all alone in the wilderness without anything to look at. So yes, I don’t see why not. I shouldn’t need them back till . . . well . . . till there’s a child who might like to look at them.”
“Thanks,” I tell her, and before I can add how I won’t just be reading them myself, she’s gone all pink and bashful and ducked into the store.
Before long she’s back with a satchel that weighs down her arm something fierce. Under a pile of novels I’ll never read, there’s all six McGuffey Readers, two spellers, a Mitchell’s Geography, and a lovely old primer that will be perfect for William and Victor.
On Saturday I’m up early and pulling to the Norley dock with Ida’s primer and McGuffey’s First Reader. I’m not anything like a proper teacher, but Hannah’s right. William and Victor wouldn’t do well with someone like Miss Bradley or Miss Gower. They need a teacher who will let them wiggle and twitch as they chant A, B, C. Someone who can figure out a way to teach them, so each of us gets something we want.
The boys are waiting for me on the dock. Right away they ask do I want to see an apple as big as my head.
“There’s no such thing,” I reply, but they walk me through their small orchard and sure enough, there are several ridiculously large apples under a gnarly old tree. Victor makes a gift of one, and I have to take it in both hands.
“This will make my brother giggle like a fool,” I say, and both boys beam and start elbowing each other. “We really should start the lessons, though.”
Victor sighs noisily. William’s face falls, but he’s polite enough—or worried enough about Hannah’s wooden spoon upside his ear—that he just nods.
“I thought maybe we could have lessons outside,” I go on. “Right here, in your orchard.”
“Really?” William perks up. “Hannah cleared off the table, but being outside would be much better.”
“Yeah!” Victor plops down without me having to ask.
So we do.
I wouldn’t exactly call William and Victor willing pupils. Their learning to read is clearly Hannah’s idea, but by noon, they can manage the alphabet reliably. Pictures worked with Milly and Maude, but William and Victor do better when I have them run between trees, hitting the trunks each time they say a letter.
We move inside after dinner. I pour a handful of silty sand on two cedar planks, and the boys practice drawing letters in it. Hannah comes over to watch, toying with a washrag. She hovers till I slide a board with sand in front of her, and she joins her brothers, carefully making letters, then smoothing out the sand to write the next one.
“Supper will be ready soon.” Hannah nods toward the wapatos and venison cooking in a shallow dish on the stove. “You’re welcome to stay.”
“Tempting, but I’d best be off before it gets too dark. Lawrence likely has better things to do than see me home again.” I turn to William and Victor. “You both did very well today. I’m pleased with how hard you’re both working.”
Victor frowns at the sandy boards. “You really mean that? You’re not just saying that because we’re friends?”
“Of course I mean it,” I say, because William is nodding skeptically and mostly I’m surprised that they consider me a friend when I haven’t known them very long and I’m their teacher, sort of.
Then again, there’s nothing wrong with learning from your friends. So I add, “It’s best to call things as they are. So yes, you both did well and no, I’m not saying that just because we’re friends.”
The boys grin, and it occurs to me they might not have a lot of company besides each other. They might be just as happy to have a new friend as Hannah is.
I remind William and Victor to work on making letters in the sand all week. I leave the primer so they have something to copy. They walk me down to the dock, chattering over each other like jackdaws. I tuck my head-size apple in the bow to keep it safe.
Jer hugs the apple like it’s a rabbit. He cries when Mrs. D wants to make it into applesauce. He tucks it into his bed along with Hoss and Other Hoss.
“How it get big?” Jer asks. “We have another?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him, “but I know two boys who might.”
I’m pretty sure they’ll tell me if I ask. It’s the sort of thing a friend would do.
25
IT’S STILL DARK WHEN MRS. D nudges me awake. I wash up, then go take care of Bad Goat. Two new batches of goat cheese are ready to go to Mr. Pinkham’s store. Hannah showed me how to make molds out of old tin cans, and I drew some crooked pictures of them in my reflections on Homesteading.
All the way up Third Avenue I jingle the coins in my skirt pocket that I got from Bad Goat’s cheese. I’ll be able to give them to Miss Baker for tuition.
I’ll be able to stay on that hard school bench with my friends.
At noon we sit on the
porch and unpack our dinners. Below, Seattle is busy. Bustling, even. Some boys are digging for clams, the millhands are turning out pilings, and a handful of Chinese men are setting puncheon logs into the mud in front of Mr. Horton’s store to make a sidewalk.
“Digging clams looks like more fun than eating them,” I say. “Hey, will one of you teach me how?”
Evie wrinkles her nose. “I have no idea how to dig clams, and I don’t care at all to learn.”
Jenny wiggles her fingers at me. “I can do without the blisters. I’d rather read.”
“You already know how to read,” I point out.
“Next thing we know, Jane will want to learn to set puncheons,” Evie teases. “It’ll be her and Mr. Ling and Mr. Han and their boys.”
The other girls laugh and shoulder-bump me playfully, but saplings cut in half and buried so the cut sides line up flat and perfect could firm up the long bank or even the lake trail.
I would. I would like to learn to set puncheons.
I love Evie dearly. Jenny, too. But preserving your ignorance only leaves you at the mercy of someone else, and you’ll be very lucky if they merely call you poor dear and leave you alone.
I might never get a leaving certificate. I don’t even know if schools like Miss Baker’s can give them. The whole Pacific coast is my schoolhouse, though, and I’ll never be done learning.
That afternoon Miss Baker calls on me to recite. I stand and read my assigned passage without missing a single word.
Not even the big ones.
When it’s Madge’s turn, I sneak my pamphlet out of my dress pocket and open it in my lap. I write a new reflection.
There is more than one way for a girl to broaden her mind.
It’s Sunday. I’ve been turned out of the cabin so Mrs. D can take a bath in the tin washtub. Dad took Jer down to the long bank, just the two of them.
I wander out toward the salmonberry patch with my carpetbag over my shoulder. I take out my reflections and flip through the pages. My chapters on Homesteading and Food and Canoeing are filled in pretty well, and School is coming along nicely. My penmanship isn’t the best and my spelling would never pass even the kindest teacher, but everything I’ve written goes from margin to margin. No corrections or improvements here.
The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming Page 17