Carla Kelly (24 page)

“If you're still teaching here then,” Miss Clayson snapped.

“I will be,” Della replied. “I wouldn't dream of leaving Winter Quarters Canyon.” She went to the closet and took out the broom, thinking of Billy Evans. “I will teach Billy Evans to read, and …”

The closet seemed to remind Miss Clayson. “Those crayons! We are not so frivolous here. These are poor children who need all the education they can get, to find their way out of the mines. Maybe you cannot assess such needs, considering your own background.”

“It is precisely because of my background that I know their needs,” Della fired back, wondering where her courage was coming from. “They don't know they're poor! Their parents love them and they do the best they can.”
I wish I had been blessed with half their advantages
, she nearly said, but stopped herself in time.

Della began to sweep the floor as Miss Clayson seethed.

“I could dismiss you right now,” she said.

“I doubt you could get another teacher here this year,” Della said, her voice calm as she swept around her desk. “I have excellent references and have done nothing to warrant dismissal. Each student will be working at grade level by May, when school ends.” She stopped sweeping and looked Miss Clayson in the eyes again. “We will have fun along the way, with magic paper and crayons. We might even sing and dance a little, if the mood is on us.”

Silence hung in the classroom like a foul odor as Della kept sweeping. When she finished, she put the broom away and began to erase the board, pressing hard because her hands were beginning to shake.

She turned around and nearly gasped to see Miss Clayson coming closer, her eyes alive with anger now, as though she had been deliberately stoking some inner fire that Della could not understand. She pushed Della aside and picked up the drawings in question, flipping one after another faster and faster. She stopped on Bryn Lloyd's drawing of him and his father, standing close together in the mine.

“What is this?” Miss Clayson snapped.

“It's … it's Bryn and his da … his father. Bryn is a boney picker in the summer because it helps the fam—”

“This is the very thing I am determined to squelch!” Miss Clayson shouted. “You're encouraging them! You're glorifying life in the mines!”

“No, I—”

“I want them out of the mines!” Miss Clayson waved the picture, then clutched it in both hands, as if to tear it in half.

“Don't you dare!” Della said, trembling in her own anger. “I asked my children to draw me a picture of something
they
did during the summer. This is what Bryn Lloyd did. That is all. I am not glorifying
anything
, Miss Clayson. I merely want to know my children!”

“Your children! They are
pupils
. Students. We are to mold their lives!”

Della was pleading now. “Don't tear that picture. I couldn't bear it if Bryn ever found out what you think of him and his family. Don't. Just don't.”

Della held out her hand, even though it trembled. “I will educate them to the best of my ability this year, but I refuse to even suggest that the work their fathers do is anything less than noble labor.”

The room was silent, except for the ticking of the clock and Miss Clayson's labored breathing. Miss Clayson flung Bryn's picture at her and stalked from the room, slamming the door behind her until the windows rattled.

Della sagged against the desk, then sank to her knees to retrieve the picture, drawn so lovingly. She picked it up and set it carefully on her desk with the others. She heard a sound and looked up in fear, not certain she could withstand another visit from her principal.

Israel Bowman stood in the door now, his face white. Della just shook her head and got to her feet. She shouldered past him and hurried down the back steps. Hanging onto the swings, she threw up on the playground.

When she finally looked up, humiliated, Israel was sitting on the back steps, a glass of water in his hand. She sank down wearily beside him and accepted the glass, drinking it down.

“I heard everything,” he said. “My word, I think Winter Quarters Canyon heard it all!”

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

“No fears, Della,” he said, getting up to pump her another class of water. “I'll wager you'll have a canyon full of champions, if word of this gets out. How dare she bully you like that.”

She drank, then gave him a weak smile. “I hope to high heaven there weren't any students in the building.”

“Not too many,” he told her, attempting his cheerful self again, although she could tell he was still shaken. “Just a Parmley, a Pugh, an Jones, and a Llewellen in my room, their eyes like saucers! I told them to scurry out the back way. Pretty fleet children.” He put his arm around her shoulder, gave her a squeeze, and let her go. “Della, you'll do. She didn't bawl me out quite that bad my first week here. Walk you home?”

She nodded, grateful for his solicitude. She looked at the mess she had made by the swing set and groaned.

“I'll sluice it away while you gather up your pictures. I certainly wouldn't leave them here. Della, those pictures are probably even more wonderful than you know. You're really going to send them to
the
Mr. Auerbach?”

He kept up a soothing conversation all the way to Mabli Reese's, after a quick stop at the Wasatch Store to rummage through a pile of boxes until she found the right one. Clarence Nix assured her he would get a package in the outgoing mail tomorrow morning, if she would bring it by on her way to school.

“You going to be all right?” Israel asked, as he walked her to her front door.

“I am, thanks to you,” she said.

He held up his hands. “I can't take credit for the way you handled Miss Clayson. See you tomorrow, Della. I'll, uh, scram now.”

Della went inside and closed the door, just leaning against it, relieved to be home, relieved to have half a canyon and a closed door or two between her and the wrath of Clayson. With a sigh that ended in a ragged sob, she unbut-toned her shirtwaist and had it off, trailing behind her, by the time she collapsed on her bed. After a few minutes, she sat up and looked at the two red dragons at the foot of her bed. She left her bed and picked up the small carved box on her bureau, turning it over to see Angharad's little signature dragon there. She went to the wooden shutter and found the dragon. Her heart seemed to lift as she suddenly realized she was surrounded by the protection of dragons.

She lay down again, exhausted, and thought of dragons and
bwca
and singing and brave men with coal scars who worked underground. “Owen, you're no bully at all,” she murmured. “I'm going to be stubborn, though. If I went to choir practice tonight, I would just cry.”

She slept for an hour, then woke up, put on her old dress and apron, and went next door to help Mabli get supper for the miners. By the time the girls had cleaned the kitchen and carried their portion of food home to their families, her heart was good again.

ella stayed up too late, writing her letter to Samuel Auerbach, telling him of her students and their drawings on the cardboard from Menswear. Mabli came in when she finished setting tomorrow's bread at the boardinghouse. Indignation burned in the woman's eyes. “Little Doris Pugh told me.”

Della put down her pen. “Miss Clayson's just a bitter woman, for some reason.” She sat back, suddenly tired. “I choose not to become like her.”

Mabli brewed them chamomile tea to serve with her shortbread biscuits. “I made extra for your class tomorrow,” she said, then picked up her knitting.

“Mabli, are the dragons good or evil?”

“They are neither. They are
defiant
.” She stood up then, kissed the top of Della's head. “Good night, my dear. God grant you a good sleep.”

He will
, Della thought. She finished the letter, read it again, and set it in the box with the heart and soul of her students, her amazing, unexpected reward after only two days of teaching in a mining camp. Maybe she would write to Uncle Jesse Knight tomorrow night in the library, when she wasn't so upset. She had promised the Knights a letter.

But it was late and Mabli had to get up early to fix breakfast. She might lie in bed all night and toss and turn, but she wouldn't disturb her landlady. She was unbuttoning her shirtwaist again and thinking about an apple in the kitchen—dinner had been gall and wormwood—when someone knocked softly on the door.

Her heart in her throat, she imagined Miss Clayson there with some giant powder to toss in the room and blow Mabli's tidy house to smithereens.
Della, you're an idiot
, she thought. She edged toward the door, unwilling to open it.

Another knock and then a woman's voice, with lilting accent, and not Miss Clayson's.

“Sister Anders, it's Annie Jones. Do let us in.”

Della let out her breath and opened the door, stepping back in surprise to see Sister Jones followed by a dozen others. As she looked at them, she realized this was the Pleasant Valley Ward choir and wondered what Owen Davis was up to now.

Sister Jones seemed to have appointed herself spokesman. “Forgive us for the lateness of the hour, but we were talking about the drawings after choir practice and wanted to see all of them. We've only seen our own children's drawings.”

They don't know about my confrontation
, Della thought, relieved not to tell them. “Come in, all of you. I'll pass them around.” She laughed. “I had them sign their names small at the bottom on the front. You know, as great masters like da Vinci and Raphael signed their work. On the back, I wrote a little about the picture too, and so did they.”

She took the pictures from the carton, grateful she had not packaged it to mail yet and handed them from parent to parent. Della's heart felt at peace again to see Billy Evans's father nod his head to see his son fishing in Winter Quarters Creek. She had to dab at her eyes as she watched Sister Margarad Terfil run her fingers gently over the picture of her showing Maud how to knead bread. Rachel Hood laughed to see her daughter going underwater as her husband baptized her in the creek, dammed up for just that occasion, according to Alice's account.

“We wait until summer, when the creek water is warmer,” Rachel confided.

“I was ten when I was baptized,” Della told her. She realized with a start that she had never told anyone even that much about her own baptism, because Aunt Caroline had thought it shameful for her brother-in-law to wait so long.

She looked around, pleased at the sight of satisfaction written so large over something so small. There was Owen Davis, taking Thomas Farish's good-natured teasing because he didn't have a boney picker of his own, but just a daughter. The pictures drawn on magic paper with Rainbow Colors went around again, and then the parents filed out as silently as they had come in, except for Owen, who held up his hands in self defense.

“Not guilty! Sister Jones insisted we disband c-h-o-i-r early so we could see the masterpieces.”

He had spelled out the word, which made her laugh. “You're i-n-n-o-c-e-n-t,” she spelled back. “Probably as p-ur-e as Ivory Soap too.” She opened the door for him.

She thought the others had gone, but they were standing outside in a semicircle. When Owen joined the men's side, someone gave a note, and they began to sing to her in Welsh. Della leaned against the doorsill and listened, her heart full now where only an hour ago it had been empty. When they finished, they walked slowly away, Owen tagging behind again.