Tisha (19 page)

“My mother ain’t payin’ for me to cook and clean,” she said stoically. “She’s payin’ for you to tutor me.”

It was my turn to be surprised. “Nancy, your mother isn’t paying me anything.”

“What are you talkin’ about? I heard ’er tell you when you first came through that she’d pay you for takin’ me.”

“Yes, she did. But I sent her a note back on the day you arrived. I told her she could forget about paying me.”

She fought against believing me at first, but when I assured her it was true she went pale.

“Why’d you do that?” she said. Her voice seemed to come from far away.

“I was glad to have the company,” I said honestly. “I was afraid being here all by myself.” She looked so miserable that I wished I could think of something to console her. “I guess I should have told you,” I said finally.

There was coffee in the coffeepot and I asked her if she wanted some. She shook her head. After I poured a cup for myself I sat down at the table again, feeling terrible.

“Nancy, if you’d like to stay, maybe we could try again.”

She got up and went to the window. She slowly rubbed some moisture from a pane and stared out into the darkness.

Then she cried for a long time.

From then on Nancy changed. She hadn’t been one to show her feelings much before we had the argument, and she didn’t make any big display after it, but I could see the difference in her right away. Up to then I almost had to drag her out of bed in the morning. After that she was up when I was and sometimes even before. She was a dynamo, cleaning and washing, taking care of herself and doing so many chores that half a dozen times I had to tell her to slow down. She wouldn’t, though. The way she acted towards me you’d
have thought that my letting her stay with me without getting paid for it made me some kind of a heroine.

I kept complimenting her all over the place and she just glowed. She hardly ever looked me straight in the eye, and she wouldn’t smile because of the cavities in her front teeth. I could tell she was pleased, though.

After a few days we sat down and had a good talk, something we’d never done before. I told her I appreciated everything she was doing, but I didn’t want her wearing herself out. She said I wasn’t to worry about that. “I just want to show you I appreciate what you did for me,” she said, picking at some loose threads on her overalls. It was a habit she had that used to drive me crazy, always giving her attention to something else when you talked with her, as if she didn’t really care what you were saying. She did, though. She just didn’t know how to show it.

I tried to tell her I didn’t do any more for her than Miss Ivy had done for me—a heck of a lot less, really, because I needed her help—but she wouldn’t hear of it.

“You did more for me than anybody in my whole life,” she insisted, “and I’m not forgetting it.”

“If you really feel that way there’s one way you
could
pay me back,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Be a little more friendly with the kids in class.”

“Won’t do any good. They don’t take to me.”

“They would if you gave them the chance. They’re a little afraid of you.” I told her that she could act as sort of my assistant, like a helping teacher.

“Some helping teacher,” she said, pulling out a thread she’d been worrying, “I can’t even read.”

“Nancy, you
can
read. All you have to do is give up that old crazy system you made up. Sit down and learn how to break words up into sounds and I guarantee you’ll be reading inside of a month. Then you’ll really be my assistant.”

She didn’t promise anything, and I didn’t expect too much, so I was really surprised when she not only buckled down to work, but in her own way tried to be nicer to the other kids. Before, whenever she was in
class she wouldn’t budge for anybody. Now she started getting up to close the stove door whenever the classroom became too hot, or open it when it was chilly. When a few of the “books” the children had made started falling apart, she fixed them. She took them over to the roadhouse and sewed the pages together on Maggie Carew’s machine, then shoved them at the kids with a gruff, “Here, I fixed ’em for ya.” She was tops in arithmetic too, so one morning I asked her if she’d help Jimmy with his multiplication tables. She and Jimmy hadn’t said a word to each other since she’d slapped him and neither of them looked too keen about the idea. I sent them into my quarters to work, and when I glanced through the door a few minutes later she was tutoring him as if she’d done it all her life.

After she helped Jimmy the class was less leery of her. She even made up a game—a multiplication clock, she called it. It was a clock made out of cardboard with one hand on it, and she’d move the hand from one number to the next while the kids multiplied by two, or three, or five. After a while, we used a stopwatch to see how fast each of the children could do it.

She really blossomed. It didn’t take more than a couple of weeks before some of the kids were taking a shine to her. During recess, when it was too cold for the little ones like Joan and Willard to go out, I let her supervise the older kids outside while the little ones played in the schoolroom. In private I told her that I’d appreciate it if she’d watch out for Chuck. The other kids didn’t pick on him as much as they had when he first came, but once in a while they still reminded him he wasn’t as good as they were, especially the Vaughn twins.

She watched out for him better than I could. During one recess I heard him start to cry outside and I went to the door. I opened it just in time to see Nancy give Eleanor Vaughn a shove that made her sit down on her behind fast. She’d have done the same with Evelyn if Evelyn hadn’t danced out of the way. They must have washed Chuck’s face with snow because it was all red and wet. None of them saw me, so I figured I’d
let Nancy handle it. She was tougher than the two of them put together.

“You keep your hands off this kid from here on,” Nancy said to Evelyn, putting a mitten on Chuck’s shoulder.

“Since when you sticking up for siwashes?” Eleanor said, getting up.

“I’m not stickin’ up for ’em anymore ’n I’d stick up for you,” Nancy answered. “The teacher says you keep your hands off, so keep your hands off.”

“You don’t have any right to tell us what do do,” Eleanor sneered.

“That’s right,” Evelyn said.

“I’m not tellin’ you what to do. I’m just tellin’ you that if you lay your hands on this kid again I’m gonna bash your head in.”

They left Chuck alone from then on.

I guessed I was never so happy in my life as around that time. Everything just seemed the way I’d dreamed it would be—the settlement and all the country around hushed under a thick white blanket, the snow dry enough so you could walk around in moccasins and never get wet. Now I realized what the North was really like. It was made for winter, because winter was when everything went on. You could ski any place you wanted to and get there twice as fast and twice as easily as you could before there was snow. People went out and brought in the trees they’d cut for firewood and left lying until they could use sleds to haul them. The whole country just opened right up. You could hear somebody talking on the trail half a mile away, or dropping a pan on the stove a mile from the settlement. It was so quiet and open and free that it was like being let out of prison. It put everybody in good spirits and they went around looking the way the country did—clean and fresh.

Came lunchtime, the class was usually out of the room like a shot, and fifteen minutes later, after bolting their lunch, the kids were outside with sleds and skis. I learned how to ski in no time at all. I’d done a little when I was a kid, but that was just with barrel staves. It wasn’t anything like real skiing. Once I
learned I was as anxious as the class to get out and slide the hills.

The one thing I would have liked to learn was skijoring—holding onto a string of dogs and letting them pull you—but I wasn’t any good at it. Fred was expert at it and he tried to teach me a couple of times, but the dogs kept pulling me off balance. Finally, on the second try, he told me he was going to work something out where that wouldn’t happen. “You be ready next Saturday morning,” he said when I asked him what it was. “I’ll be by around ten.”

Almost on the dot I heard him call my name, and when I opened the door he was out there on his own skis, waiting. He’d brought his favorite lead dog, Pancake, and two others. “You ready?”

It wasn’t that cold out, so I threw on a canvas parka with a warm sweater underneath. Outside on the porch I started to take my skis, but he said leave them. Then I saw what he’d done. He’d fitted an extra pair of straps on his own skis so I could stand behind him.

“You think it’ll work?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never tried it.”

Nancy watched from the doorway while I got on, and I had the barest second to wave to her before he yelled “Mush!” and we were off.

We didn’t go too fast at first because the dogs weren’t able to dig into the packed-down snow of the settlement. Once we were on the trail, though, we speeded up. Then Fred began to sing
Sweet Rosie O’Grady
to them and they began to pull like sixty. Everybody had a different way of making sled dogs pull. Some used a whip. Others, like Angela Barrett, yelled and cursed at them all the time. Her dogs were so used to it that they wouldn’t pull unless she swore at them, so you could hear her coming from a half-mile away. Fred sang to his and they loved it

“No singing!” I yelled.

“Why not?”

“We’re going too fast.”

“We haven’t even started.”

“Fred, we’ll fall!”

“No we won’t!”

I held onto his parka as tight as I could, his skis crunching under us. The dogs were thirty feet ahead, the full length of the lead rope. If they geed or hawed all of a sudden I knew I was going to be dumped.

But I hung on. Skiing was fun, but it wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as this.

After a while I started to congratulate myself. I was doing pretty well. I leaned into turns easily and could key my movements to Fred’s, as if we were on a bicycle built for two. We must have gone half a mile before I got so cocky I didn’t look where we were going.

The trail took a sharp turn. Fred leaned to the left, I dragged him off to the right, and we went flying.

Luckily we ended up in a drift, laughing. We didn’t bother to get up right away, just lay back where we fell. “You all right?” Fred asked.

“Perfect. Maybe I’ll take a nap.” I propped myself up on my elbows, watching the dogs. They’d taken a spill too, and a couple of them were tangled in the lead lines. They were well trained, though, and didn’t get excited about it Pancake was a beauty, brown mask over a gray wolf face and slanted ice-blue eyes. Panting, he went to Fred as though he’d done something wrong, his tail down and his rear end moving from side to side.

“Look at that He thinks it was his fault,” Fred said. He sat up and started untangling the rope.

“Well, whose fault was it?” “Yours.”

“I knew I’d be blamed.”

“Better than blaming Pancake.” He rubbed the dog’s head. “He’ll feel bad.”

“How about me?”

“You can take it.”

I picked up a gob of snow and tossed it at him. He blocked it easily and it went to powder, then shoveling up a bigger gob, he hefted it high in the air. It plopped down on the hood of my parka and most of it stayed there.

“You look like a tree,” he said.

“Nicest thing you ever said to me.”

I looked up at the blue sky. It was still early, but
the sun was low, skimming the distant mountain tops and sending out long blue shadows from the trees.

I watched Fred while he straightened out the harness. He’d been out on the traplines the week before and he was brown as a coffee bean. I’d really liked being so close to him on the skis and I wondered if he felt the same thing about me. I had a feeling he did. Even if he did, though, he didn’t show it. It was the way he always acted with me. Careful. So far all he’d done was hold my hand once when we were alone. We never talked about it, but I knew full well why he was being so careful. He’d swallowed a lot of that half-breed baloney people around here were always slicing and it made him keep his distance from me, as if he wasn’t as good as the next boy and I was something special. If he’d been pure white he’d have acted a whole lot different.

I wished there was some way I could show him how much I liked him, but I didn’t know how. I’d tried just about everything.

The last time I was over at his house I’d let him beat me at carom checkers, and when we talked politics lately I let him convince me he was right even though he was a Democrat and I was for the Republicans. I’d even told him all about the junky places I’d grown up in, and how one summer I’d worked as a hired girl on a ranch, just so he wouldn’t think my being a teacher made me a member of the aristocracy, but he still kept his distance.

I didn’t know what more I could do. When I used to live with Miss Ivy she told me that boys didn’t like it when a girl ran after them. There were ways to show a boy that you favored him, she said, ways you could encourage him—only she never told me what those ways were. I figured I’d given him all the encouragement I could, short of coming right out and being bold about it.

Fred got up now, brushed himself off and gave me a hand. Then we were off again.

A couple of minutes later we were in sight of Mary Angus’ place.

There was smoke coming from the stovepipe, which
meant she was all right. A couple of weeks ago when I’d seen her on the trail near Fred’s house, I’d been scared she might die. She’d been pretty far away and it was almost dark. She was pulling a hand sled, and her little girl was with her. They were probably heading out for her trap line. We waved to each other, but before she went on she doubled over, coughing. A minute later when I crossed the place where she’d stopped I saw there was blood spattered all over the snow. Every time I thought about it I felt as sick as I did then. I’d written to the minister in Eagle to ask him if he could collect some food for her from the people there and he’d said he would. The Purdys saw to it that she had enough wood too, but there wasn’t much else anybody could do. For a second I wondered if we should stop and see how she and her little girl were, but I decided against it. I’d just be bothering her.