Tisha (21 page)

It was the outhouse that almost caused a tragedy of sorts at the end of the week. Ten minutes after I excused little Willard Friday morning he still hadn’t come
back to the classroom, so Nancy went out to see what was keeping him. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have bothered because he was in the habit of running home sometimes and staying there a while, but this time I just thought I’d check. I was sure glad I did, because Nancy came back right away, trying not to laugh and looking worried at the same time. Willard was stuck to the seat.

Getting him off turned out to be a major undertaking. We tried pouring warm water around him, but it froze almost as soon as it hit the boards, so finally Mr. Carew had to bring a crowbar and pry the boards off. The outhouse was a two-holer, so when we carried Willard into my quarters the boards were long enough so that he looked for all the world like a prince on a litter. It didn’t seem to bother him, though. We propped one end of the boards on the stove and the other over a chair and he sat as calm as you please until he thawed off.

After that Mr. Vaughn loaned us a ten-gallon kerosene can with the top cut off. We put a toilet seat on it and put it in the cache. Since it was almost as cold in the cache as it was outside, somebody lined the seat with caribou fur to make sure nobody got stuck again.

The weather didn’t keep anybody from coming to the dance, though. Just about everybody showed up. They were really something, those dances. Before everybody arrived the old-timers would sit around playing cribbage or rummy, and Fred would take out his banjo so that the rest of us could play musical chairs. By the time it was 8:30 the schoolroom and my quarters were jam-packed and we were ready. Then with Fred on banjo, his mother on accordion and Ben Norvall playing the fiddle and calling, everybody stomped and swung their partners so hard the dirt kept jumping up between the floorboards. And that Friday was no exception. It got so hot we didn’t even need the stove after a while.

I had as much fun watching as dancing, especially when Rebekah Harrington was on the floor. She was almost as heavy as Angela Barrett, but she swung around and do-se-do’d like a young girl. Now that it was colder she wore about half a dozen skirts, and as
the dance wore on she worked herself into such a sweat that she kept taking them off, one after the other.

She’d started showing up at school every so often again, but if the school board objected to it they didn’t say anything to me, so I let her come. They didn’t want to tangle with her husband Jake again. She must have been studying with Lily at home because she knew her letters. Whenever I gave my beginners drill with flash cards I could see her lips moving, naming the letters as I held them up. She wanted to learn to read, I knew that, but so far I hadn’t tried to work with her. I intended to, though, as soon as I felt I could do it without getting into trouble over it. She was just about the happiest person in all of Chicken. It didn’t seem to bother her in the least that the women in the settlement snubbed her. It didn’t bother Jake either. “Goddammit, boys,” he told a bunch of miners in the roadhouse one night, “if you had the brains God gave you, you’d mush out to that Indian village and bring yourself back a squaw.” Rebekah and his little girl Lily had been with him. Picking up Lily, he’d stood her on the table. “Take a look at that beauty, will ya—black as the ace of spades, but I love her! And that goes for my woman too. You want to look down your nose at me, you go on ahead. She ain’t the Rose of Sharon, but goddammit, I got myself the fattest, cleanest, hardworkingest woman any man here ever warmed up to on a cold winter’s night!”

“Got biggest mouth in whole No’th country too,” Rebekah had murmured. She hadn’t looked too happy, I didn’t blame her, but Jake just laughed, crooked an elbow around her neck and gave her a fat kiss on the cheek.

She plumped herself down alongside of me and Maggie Carew right after the square dancing was over and Uncle Arthur was winding up his gramophone.

“How you doin’, Tisha?” she asked me.

“Fine, Rebekah. How about you?”

She let out a long sigh of satisfaction. “Ah, I have lotsa fun me. Like dance too damn much. How you doin’, Miz Carew?”

“Gettin’ by,” Maggie said.

“You make plenty money tonight,” Rebekah said. “Everybody they too hungry when dance over, they maybe eat table and chair. What you think?”

“Whatever money I make you can be a damn sight sure I’ll earn it.”

“By golly,” Rebekah said, sympathetically, “you tell truth. Not easy make cook for so much people.”

Maggie got up. “I better get along. Gotta start preparin’.”

Rebekah fanned herself with her hand. “Whew—too damn hot, I think.”

I had to smile. “Too much dancing, I think.”

“Ah, I like have good times. Life short. Today you here, laugh, tomorrow you go in ground, everybody shovel dirt on you.”

Uncle Arthur had put on a waltz and the kids who were still awake were the first ones out on the floor. Two or three of them were already asleep on my bed along with Rebekah’s Lily. Jimmy Carew was dancing with Joan Simpson, while one of the Vaughn twins was trying to wrestle Mert Atwood around the floor. As usual Fred danced the first waltz with his mother. They were so graceful that most people just stood on the side and watched them. He glanced over at me and we gave each other a quick smile. I’d looked over Uncle Arthur’s records and made sure about the label on
Home Sweet Home.
It was green, all right.

As the evening wore on I kept looking over at Uncle Arthur whenever I could, hoping I’d spot that label. I saw him start to put it on once and so did Fred, but he took it off again when he saw the two of us head for each other.

It was almost two o’clock before he slipped it on. I was talking with Nancy and the next thing I knew Joe Temple was tapping me on the shoulder and grinning down at me. Except for the way he treated Mary Angus, I didn’t have anything against Joe, but I was so annoyed I felt like going over to Fred and saying, “Why don’t we let them all go over to the roadhouse and you and I stay here together?” It must have showed, too.

“Don’t look so peevish,” Joe said when we were
waltzing. “You could have ended up with old man Vaughn.”

That would have been something. Ever since the school-board meeting he hardly nodded to me.

“And you could have ended up with Angela Barrett.”

When the waltz ended, I went to get my coat. I caught Fred’s eye and we both kind of shrugged as if to say that’s the way we knew it would be.

The roadhouse was so crowded it took almost an hour before everybody was served. Even Willard was carrying plates back and forth.

Joe had taken out a pipe and was smoking and I was almost finished eating when Maggie came over.

“How’s the grub?” she asked.

I told her the truth. It was delicious. Nancy and I had cooked up some salmon bellies and sauerkraut a couple of times, but Maggie’s was the best I’d tasted. She’d saved Joe and me the little table against the wall, and had even put a candle on it.

“Good to see you two together,” Maggie said. “You make a nice couple.”

“That’s a coincidence,” Joe said, “we were just talking about getting married.”

“Wouldn’t hurt either of ya,” Maggie said. “Keep you both out of trouble. ’Specially her,” she added before she walked off.

I felt like telling her that if he married anybody he ought to marry Mary Angus. Back in Evansville once there’d been a boy who’d gotten a girl into trouble and there wasn’t one woman in town who didn’t think that the right thing for him to do was marry her. And he did, too. If Mary hadn’t been an Indian everybody here would have felt the same, but because she was they didn’t give a hoot. They even took Joe’s side, which was worse. Maybe she wasn’t right in doing what she did, but she wasn’t the first woman who’d ever made a mistake like that and she wouldn’t be the last.

I looked over to where Fred was sitting with his mother and I wished I was there with them. Everybody at the table was having a good time exchanging tall stories, and Ben Norvall’s turn was next. He sat
combing his moustaches with his fingers while people kept suggesting stories they wanted to hear him tell again.

The second time he’d showed up at school I’d had to take Maggie’s advice and tell him that he couldn’t come in unless he took a bath. Face black, hair matted, filthy pants held up by wire and string, he looked like he’d come out of a cave. Even so, not wanting to hurt his feelings, I weaseled around a little, saying that I didn’t personally find the way he looked and smelled offensive, but that I had to protect the health of the children. The truth was that, even keeping as much distance as possible between us, I still came near the edge of a dead faint a couple of times.

I’d brought him into my quarters to tell him in private, and he’d been very understanding. He’d had no idea, he’d said, that the children’s health was endangered. Now that he did, he would take steps to remedy the situation. The next time he showed up he was a different man. Bathed, and dressed in clean clothes, he fairly glowed. He’d even bought a new pair of heavy duty suspenders to hold up his pants. The only drawback was that now his face was washed you could see all his blackheads sprouting like potato eyes.

He was a good storyteller though.
The
one he told this time was about a partner of his who’d died on him in the middle of winter.

“I didn’t know what to do with that sucker,” Ben was saying. “I couldn’t tell when the marshal’d be out to pick up the body and he was beginning to smell worse than a siwash fish stew. I couldn’t leave ’im outside because there was a blizzard blowin’ and he’d a been covered by drifts so high I wouldn’t be able to find ’im till spring. Had an outside cache, but he was too damn heavy for me to lift him up to it.”

“What’d you finally do?”

“Well, you’re not gonna believe this, but it’s God’s truth. I just took ’im out and propped him against the side of the cabin, left him there for about two hours till he was frozen stiff, then I stored him up in the cache.”

“I thought you said he was too hard to lift.”

“Too hard to lift in one piece, I meant. But stiff like
he was all I had to do was snap off his arms and legs, then throw ’im in the cache piece by piece. The marshal was a little peeved when he had to collect him, wanted to file charges against me for desecratin’ a corpse, but I explained the situation to him and he was as decent as you please. I heard later that after the undertaker got through with that sucker not a soul was the wiser.”

Ben’s story was followed by a few more from others, each one wilder than the one before. When they were ended I asked Joe if he’d seen Mary lately. He said no.

“I don’t mean to stick my nose in, Joe, but she really needs some help. She goes out trapping and she shouldn’t.”

“I thought you said you don’t mean to stick your nose in.”

“I don’t, but I just can’t understand why you treat her the way you do.”

“I don’t treat her any way at all. I haven’t even seen her in over a month.”

“That’s what I mean. Don’t you care anything about her at all?”

“Why should I?”

“Because she’s a human being.” Because she had two children by you was what I wanted to say.

“Hey, are you a social worker or a teacher?” he asked sarcastically.

We didn’t have much to say after that, and in a way I was sorry I’d said anything about it at all. He wasn’t a bad guy. He’d made a pass at me once, but when he saw I wasn’t interested he hadn’t made a fuss about it.

We left a few minutes later. He was quiet all the way back to my quarters, so I knew he was irritated with me. I didn’t realize how mad he really was, though, until we reached the porch and I thanked him for taking me to supper.

“Forget it,” he said. “You taught me a lesson. I tried to help you out tonight by keeping you and that Purdy kid away from each other. Well from now on I’ll mind my own goddamn business and you mind yours.” Then he turned away from me and walked off.

“Fred!”

“Hi, Anne.”

“Come on in, it’s freezing.”

Nancy and I had just finished going over a math problem when he’d knocked. I’d heard he’d been back from the trap line for a couple of days and I was wondering when he’d be over. If Nancy hadn’t been there I’d have given him a hug, I was so glad to see him. He’d lost a little weight from being on trail and eating and sleeping in rest cabins, but he looked wonderful.

He didn’t stay long. I walked out with him on the porch before he went home.

“You ready for a snow picnic?” he asked me.

“Sure.”

“How about Saturday?”

“That’s swell. Where do you want to go?”

“We’ll go over to West Fork,” he said. “It’ll take about two hours to get there, so I’ll pick you up around nine.”

He was going to kiss me, but he glanced over at the Vaughn cabin and changed his mind. “I’ll see you Saturday,” he said.

Before that Saturday came Mrs. Purdy paid me a visit after school. When I opened the door I couldn’t have been more surprised to see her. She smiled up at me from under a beautiful hat of otter fur that made her look as chic as a Paris model. She needed something from Mr. Strong’s store, she said, but I had the feeling she wanted to talk with me in private.

Inside the store it was cold enough so that you couldn’t smell the usual collection of musty odors. All she wanted, she said, was a can of peppercorns. She
was going to make a pepper-pot stew and had just run out. She stuffed the pepper in the pocket of her fur coat, and as I was writing it down, she said, “You are going on snow picnic with my Frayd he tell me.”

“On Saturday.”

“He like you very mush, Ahnne,” she said.

“I feel the same way about him.”

“I understand why he likes you. You are attractive. Wear nice clothes. Yet I do not understand why you like
him
so much. He is only boy. He make no money, have no house, have nothing. Is that not so?”

“I never thought about that.”

“Not wise. You are pretty, Ahnne. Many men like marry you. Some day you marry man who have mush money, give you
big
house, many things … Frayd, he give you nothing.” She said it as if he were a dismal failure, and I almost had to smile.