Tisha (28 page)

Listening to him talk, slowly, confidently, and thinking about what Ben had said, I finally realized what Cathy meant when she’d told me I couldn’t judge these people by white standards. They were doing the best they knew how, and the last thing in the world they needed was to have people look down their noses at them. They had guts.

The next day, when Mr. Strong and Nancy came through to pick me up I was almost looking forward to being back in Chicken. I’d left there hoping I’d never see the place again, but staying with Cathy made me realize that my troubles just weren’t that big. When the two of us said goodbye and I thanked her for letting me stay with her I meant it. I’d learned a lot.

We arrived back in Chicken on New Year’s Eve, and Maggie invited us to a party at the roadhouse. I didn’t feel like going. Instead I stayed home and wrote a letter to Fred. I told him exactly how I felt. I missed him badly, I wrote him. I never knew it was possible to miss somebody so much, and all I did was think about him. I told him that I was mad, too—mad because he
was wrong. “You may say you did it for me,” I wrote, “but I wonder. I wonder if maybe you just didn’t really care about me that much. Maybe you were just trifling with my affections, and when it really came down to it you just took the easy way. If you did then I want you to write and tell me. I can take anything as long as it’s the truth …”

When I finished the letter I felt better. I put it in an envelope and stamped and addressed it before I could change my mind about sending it.

I sat and read for a while after that. Occasionally I’d hear whoops and hollers and square-dance music from the roadhouse. I didn’t have any desire to go over there, though. Nancy had tried to get me to come, but I’d told her there wasn’t anybody there I wanted to see. It wasn’t that I hated them, because I didn’t. Not now, anyway. For a few days I had hated them with all my might. Now I didn’t know how I felt towards them—indifferent, probably. All I wanted was for school to open so I could get busy again and not have time to think.

I was still up when twelve o’clock came and everybody started hooraying and whistling and banging on pots. Then they started singing
Auld Lang Syne
and that almost started me bawling, it made me feel so lonely. Someone came running towards the schoolhouse just as they got towards the end. It was Nancy. She burst in and there were tears in her eyes. “Anne,” she said, “I just wanted to come over and wish you … wish you a—” That was a far as she got before she rushed over and threw her arms around me and then we both started bawling. She kept saying over and over how bad she felt for me and I kept saying she shouldn’t, the two of us crying so hard I couldn’t tell whether I was consoling her or she was consoling me. We had such a wonderful cry that when it was over we almost smiled. “Please come on over, Anne,” she said. “Everybody wants you to—Uncle Arthur and Joe and Maggie Carew, everybody.”

I said no, I was too tired. And I was—all kind of cried out and empty. “You go on and have a good time,” I said. “You deserve it.” She did, too. She’d been
looking tired lately and I was worried that she was pushing herself too hard at school.

After she left I took out the letter I’d written to Fred and thought about whether to send it or throw it in the stove. I almost threw it in before I made up my mind I’d send it. After that I made a New Year’s resolution that from now on I wasn’t going to think about anything but teaching school and doing my duty, and I was going to do the best job I knew how. It made me feel better right away.

When school opened again I could feel almost from the first day that something was different about me. I wasn’t short with the children or anything like that—we still sang in the morning and had as much fun as before—but I made them work harder. They only had till June to get all the schooling they could, I figured, and they were going to get it. And that went for Rebekah too. I’d been kind of pussyfooting around with her, scared to come right out and teach her for fear of what people might say. Knowing it, she never asked any questions and just picked up what she could, but she was dying to learn. From then on I treated her like everybody else, called on her for answers, gave her assignments and let her know she was expected to learn as much as she possibly could. It was just what she’d been waiting for and she loved it.

Not one person said a word about it to me either.

People must have noticed I’d changed, because they acted differently towards me, as if I wasn’t a kid anymore—or a cheechako either for that matter. They stopped asking me things like whether it was cold enough for me or not and what I wanted to be when I grew up. When Uncle Arthur and Ben Norvall came into class a couple of days after school opened they started kidding around right away. I usually let them get away with it, but this time I told them that I’d appreciate it if they’d calm down until recess when we could all have fun. They did it too, without even looking at me cross-eyed. I felt a little bad about it when it came to Uncle Arthur because Mert Atwood had died the day before and he wasn’t feeling too good. They
both stayed, though, and just to please Uncle Arthur I gave penmanship drill.

I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but I felt different, all right—as if all my life I’d been trying to be what other people like my parents or Mr. Strong or all the people here in Chicken wanted me to be. Now I was going to be myself. I wasn’t going to be hard to get along with, or go out of my way to say anything mean, but from now on people were going to have to take me for what I was. It was the way Cathy Winters felt, I realized. I knew now why she’d answered Mr. Strong the way she had. I still wouldn’t have answered him like that myself, but I’d care just as little as she did about what he thought of me personally. It was as if I’d grown up all of a sudden, as if up to then I’d been a girl and now I wasn’t anymore.

A couple of weeks after school started I got a letter from Fred. He hadn’t been trifling with my affections at all, he wrote. He cared for me more than he’d ever cared for anybody in his life.

I read the letter over and over, and every time I saw the words if I
can take it
I winced. On the way back
from the Indian village I’d asked Nancy how Fred was doing at Steel Creek and she’d told me he was lonely. “The other miners aren’t too friendly to ’im,” she’d said. “They don’t like to work alongside natives or halfbreeds. They won’t even let him bunk with ’em.”

“Where is he staying?”

“Ma and pa rented him the workshed back of the roadhouse.” She was embarrassed. “It’s not too bad, Anne. It’s a pretty good place. I mean it’s nothing like Mary Angus’ place. It’s got a wood floor and it’s clean.”

Every time I’d thought about it I wanted to kill somebody. Fred lived in a workshed all by himself when here he had the most beautiful home of anybody and a family that loved him. And it was all my fault. He hated working for wages, and on top of it he had to work with men who didn’t even want him. He must have been miserable, but all he’d said about it was if I
can take it.

I wrote him a letter telling him I thought he should come back. “We don’t have to see each other at all,” I ended it.

I signed it “Your friend (and I mean just that), Anne.”

In a way that was the most peculiar time I ever went through. I’d never felt more alone in my life, and yet at the same time I felt more whole than I ever did. I didn’t seem to need anybody, as if there was a protective shell around me that made me so sure of myself I couldn’t say or do anything wrong. I didn’t know what it was, but I took everything in stride. Not that I didn’t feel things. I did. I just felt them in a different way. The night that Nancy finally accomplished what she’d set her heart on, for instance, I was so composed I hardly recognized myself.

We were just sitting around not doing much of anything
that night. Nancy was looking through a Third Reader and I was practicing on the harmonica. As long as I didn’t have a piano I figured I ought to have a musical instrument to play when we needed music for songs and games, so I’d taken it up at the same time Jimmy had. When Nancy and I had been feuding she’d always asked me to stop while she was studying. Now nothing seemed to bother her. I was playing
Home on the Range
and not doing bad at all when I heard her say, “Anne?”

I looked over at her and there was just no way to describe the wonderful smile on her face. Even before she said a word I knew what had happened.

“I can read,” she said.

“You sure?”

She nodded.

“Go ahead.”

“‘Once upon-ay-time,’” she read, “‘ay-crab-left-thee-sea-and-went-out-upon-thee-beach-to-warm-him-self-in-thee-sunshine …”’ She went on, sounding out each word the way a little kid would. Once or twice she almost got stuck, but she kept going. It was the first time she’d ever read anything without my help, and she read it perfectly. I didn’t know anything about psychological blocks. I did know that if that was what had been holding her back up to now, it was all gone. When she finished she was glowing.

“Was that reading?”

“That was reading.”

We tried her with a newspaper just to be sure, and she read some headlines from the Fairbanks
Daily News—Miner.
She didn’t do too badly with a few paragraphs from
Collier’s
either. She was so happy about it she almost started to cry. A couple of months before I’d not only have joined her, but I’d have wanted to run out and yell the news up and down the length of the settlement. Not that I wasn’t as happy as she was. I felt wonderful for her, and we stayed up late talking about plans for her future. I just wasn’t surprised. It was as if I’d known all along it was going to happen and accepted it that way—as something I’d expected.

Too excited to sleep, she sat up reading long after I
turned in. The next morning she told me she’d been up till two. She wasn’t the least bit tired either. She could barely wait for the class to show up to tell them all, and before the day was over everybody in Chicken knew she was able to read.

Maggie Carew invited us both over to supper to celebrate. It was the first time she’d had me over in quite a while, and it meant she wanted to bury the hatchet. Now that Fred was gone she felt more kindly towards me, or maybe she was even feeling sorry for what had happened. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I liked her. At least she was honest and straightforward. She’d been about the only one in the settlement that really said what she thought and she hadn’t made any bones about it.

After supper she asked me if I was looking forward to teaching in Eagle next year.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Whattaya mean ya don’t know,” she said. “You got a contract, ain’t ya?”

“Yes, but I hear the school board has some doubts about me.”

“Well, I oughtta have something to say about that,” she said. “End of next spring we’re movin’ there. I bought the roadhouse right alongside the dock. I’ll put in a good word for you—unless a course you got other plans.”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

I didn’t have any at all.

I’d always kept a scrapbook of poems that I liked to read over and over. My favorite was “Waiting” by John Burroughs. When I reread it it seemed as though it was almost written for me.

It was exactly the way I felt. I was just waiting—for what I didn’t know. Something. There was an empty space inside of me, but what was going to fill it up I couldn’t say.

Came February I almost wondered if I wanted to teach anywhere in Alaska at all because suddenly the weather turned so mean it felt as if God had gone away from this part of the world. Day after day the sky stayed so dark you couldn’t tell whether it was day or night. For almost a week the temperature dropped to fifty and lower and stayed there. Even if there’d been no thermometer we’d have known how cold it was: all the moisture was sucked out of the air, leaving everybody thirsty all the time—no matter how much tea or water we drank we still felt dry.

People began to get as mean as the weather. With the holidays over everybody had cabin fever—aggravation from staying indoors day after day—and they started quarrels with each other over everything. Uncle Arthur swore Ben Norvall had stolen a pick from him and just for spite went out and sprang all of Ben’s traps. Then, in a drunken rage one day, Angela Barrett threw a pot of scalding water over one of her dogs when he barked too long. Maggie Carew’s husband had to put it out of its agony by shooting it.

Maybe if I hadn’t had the class to keep me busy I’d have felt the same kind of aggravation. Sometimes I’d find myself getting annoyed over small things, but most of the time I was calm—not hard or cold or anything like that—just kind of detached, as if I was still waiting for something to happen.

When it did finally, it was a day I’d never forget.